The largely forgotten and still highly suspected anthrax attacks of 2001 that led to the Iraq War and… (2023)

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Good night. It's Monday, May 22. Welcome to another episode, a special episode, of System Update, our live show airing late Monday through Friday at This, exclusively here at Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.

Tonight we dedicate the entire show to one of the most significant events in American history in the last 40 years, which happens to be one of the most forgotten, the 2001 anthrax attacks. Just seven days after 9/11, as the debris of the World Trade Center still lay in the streets of New York City with thousands of dead bodies underneath, the media began reporting that the envelopes containing what was said at the time were extremely sophisticated and heavily armed anthrax strains were dropped at the US Postal Service and targeted at some of the most prominent journalists in the country, including NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, ABC editorial staff, NBC, CBS and the New York Post, as well as top political officials. including then-Senate Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

These anthrax spores eventually killed five people, including a photojournalist from The Sun and two postmen, and infected 17 others, 11 of whom were seriously ill. It could very easily be argued that the anthrax attacks were at least as important in increasing fear in the US as the 9/11 attacks. And it might even be plausible that they were more effective in creating widespread fear and panic. Fear enabled the US government to do everything from passing the Patriot Act and establishing a widespread national surveillance state to invading Iraq and bombing nine different countries over the next 15 years.

While the 9/11 attacks targeted key centers of symbols of American business, political and military power: two planes hit the World Trade Center in Manhattan, another crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, while the fourth plane crashed or was shot down. of Dick Cheney, supposedly on his way to the US Capitol; however, the anthrax attacks were delivered by mail. As a result, he convinced Americans far from the country's major cities, in the suburbs, in the countryside, in small towns, everywhere, that they too were under serious threat, that the vile Bond-style terrorists could attack them. with terrifying bioweapons that could show up right on their front yards, in their mailboxes, long an American symbol of friendly neighborhoods and an implicit sense of security.

That such a dastardly plot was carried out just a week after the spectacularly terrifying and traumatic 9/11 attack created the perception that everything was destabilized, that nothing was certain, that our enemies were both highly sophisticated and serious, but they had no borders of any kind, an entirely new enemy, unlike anything we had seen before, not even during the five decades of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Looking back, there is no doubt that this widespread fear and panic was deliberately nurtured and opportunistically exploited. While the 2003 invasion of Iraq was largely justified on the basis of the dangers revealed by the 9/11 attack, there was a highly influential camp of neocons and militarists in the United States eager to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam. years before the September attacks. 11 attacks. They included Joe Biden; the neocons led by Bill Kristol and David Frum, who would write post-9/11 speeches by George W. Bush, John McCain, and Dick Cheney. And many of them did not hesitate for a moment to encourage Americans to blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks, fabricating outright lies in the days and weeks following the 9/11 attacks that circulated through America's most influential media outlets. They wasted no time preparing Americans to believe. that their safety depended on overthrowing the Iraqi leader, long one of America's closest allies in the region, but now reportedly a close ally of at least Qaeda and the likely perpetrator of these anthrax attacks.

It took the FBI more than a full seven years in 2008 to claim they had finally solved the case and found the perpetrator of the attacks. After first trying to pin the blame on an American bioweapons expert named Steven Hatfill, only to pay him nearly $6 million in a lawsuit after he admitted he played no part at all, the FBI announced in 2008 that they had finally found the guilty party. had found: an American microbiologist who works at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, named Bruce Ivins. Unfortunately, the FBI said that Dr. Ivins just killed himself as he was about to be arrested, meaning the feds would never have to prove their claims against him in court, and never his case and the evidence on which it was based that they found the real assailant who subjected to rigorous cross-examination, judicial review or public inquiry. Almost immediately, serious doubts arose about the FBI's evidence and its claim to have found the real killer, both indirectly and scientifically. And that doubt came not from shady or marginalized places, but from the country's leading scientific newspapers and magazines. When the FBI finally made its scientific evidence available to a group of independent scientific researchers, the agency concluded in 2011 that the FBI's scientific evidence was much weaker than the FBI had claimed and raised more questions than it answered. .

That a crime of this magnitude, one whose effects include sweeping changes in the way the United States government operates, the power they claim, and the wars and regime change operations they will eventually launch and carry out over the next 15 years , that a crime of that magnitude remains unsolved in itself and warrants review, especially considering that every year there are more and more Americans who have forgotten about this incident or never experienced it in the first place.

But the relevance of this event and the need to revisit it goes far beyond historical importance. The FBI itself claims that the worst bioweapon attack in US history came from a US Army lab by a US Army scientist. The Origins of the COVID Pandemic.

I've been reporting on this anthrax case for years, and as I did, I became more and more convinced that lies and deliberate deception dictated the story from the start. No doubt about that. And with each passing year I believe it more and more, and now I believe it more than ever. We'll walk you through the main event, arguably the most central piece of evidence, and examine the vital questions it all raises so you can recall all that happened as part of this now deliberately forgotten episode and draw your own conclusions .

As a reminder, System Update is available as a podcast on Spotify, Apple, and all the other major podcast platforms, so check us out on the podcast version, which goes live 12 hours after our livestream here on Rumble. Just follow us, rate us and rate us. It helps us spread the visibility of the show.

For now, welcome to another installment of System Update starting now.

The main ingredient of state propaganda is historical ignorance. The observation is typically attributed to the philosopher George Santayana. "Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it" is based on that same realization. The more history is forgotten, the easier it is to use the exact same methods of deception, lies and propaganda to manipulate the public. One of the discoveries you make as you get older is that every year the number of people who never experience the events you experienced and remember vividly increases. And even for those who lived through these events, the confluence of our fast-paced lives, our need to focus on our work and family, the conscious remembrance of these events, and the erosion of memory fostered by social media that many then simply forget what they learned and what they lived. And I can't think of a major political event in the last 40 years for which this is truer than the anthrax attacks of 2001. There is no doubt that the so-called War on Terror that the United States launched after 9/11, that is, along with the financial crash of 2008, the most important political event in our lives. He radically changed the way the US government operates and its relationship with the American citizenry, enabling it to seize powers of arrest and surveillance that were previously unthinkable and continue to this day. It led to endless wars, occupations, bombings, drone wars, a torture regime, massive domestic espionage, fair trials, free prisons and all sorts of atrocities around the world, and few events fueled and enabled this war against the many-headed terror. like the anthrax attacks in September 2001. And yet few people remember much about them. That's because, once it served its purpose, it was rarely discussed, especially when the FBI claimed it solved the case by targeting a dead man who would never face justice and therefore wanted to make sure that the FBI -- the evidence was never really scrutinized . . That's why we decided to dedicate a special episode tonight to this forgotten but indescribably important event.

The facts of the anthrax attacks as presented to us at the time were quite simple. Beginning on September 18, just seven days after the 9/11 attacks, when Americans were clearly already in a state of fear and heightened concern as things seemed to be falling apart in terms of our public safety: an attack with casualties. a foreign power. on American soil that brought down the World Trade Center, a plane crashed into the Pentagon, killing 3,000 Americans. Just seven days after that, we were all still in shock, the media started reporting that what they claimed was a highly advanced and extremely weaponized version of anthrax, had been mailed and sent to various US media outlets and politicians. . And for the next six weeks, the anthrax kept popping up. New letters continued to appear, and they were accompanied by a very alarming statement that was clearly intended to link it to the 9/11 attack that we had all just experienced.

Here is one of the letters.

This is the letter sent along with anthrax to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, which we were told was very sophisticated and that only extremely sophisticated parties, very few on the planet, could produce. Participation:

this is next

take penicillin now
Death to America
death to Israel

Allah is good

So the letter was clearly intended to suggest that this was an extension of the 9/11 attack by the same people and that it would not be just one catastrophic one-day event, but a series of new events. "This is next," he said, as if it were the next horror in a long line of things to come.

To remind you how alarming the reports of this anthrax attack were, and rightly so. It had to be this extremely advanced, never seen before version that was very lethal and could be sent through your letterbox and you just had to open a letter and you would die if the spores spread. We'll show you some real-time network news reports and cable news reports on this event, to give you an idea of ​​how it was talked about.

(Video. Various clips from NBC News.)

- Welcome back, everyone. It's certainly been a rough day and days for all of us at NBC News, of course because of the press conference yesterday announcing that an NBC News employee had actually tested positive for anthrax.

- Florida man has contracted a very rare and life-threatening form of anthrax [...]

- [...] a rare inhaled form of anthrax. Secretary of State for Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson calls it an isolated case and says there was no threat of terrorism […]

- In Boca Raton, Florida, a memorial service for Bob Stevens today. He is almost certainly the first American killed in a deliberate anthrax attack […]

— Now to the home front and these Florida anthrax worries after a man died of the disease and his colleague contracted it. The FBI has taken over the investigation.

- America strikes back. Anthrax, another infection, this time on NBC News in Rockefeller Plaza.

(Video) The Largely Forgotten—And Still-Highly Suspect—2001 Anthrax Attacks That Enabled the Iraq War

• Good night. Tonight we find ourselves in the unusual and unfortunate situation of reporting on one of our dear colleagues, a member of my personal staff, who has contracted a skin infection with anthrax. It is a skin infection that responds positively to treatment and a full recovery is expected.

- There were two suspicious letters, both of which arrived on the same day. One of them contained a white substance that looked like talc. The other contained a brownish, gritty, almost gritty substance.

- In just two weeks we have had four confirmed cases of anthrax, all linked to the media, and also several cases of anthrax.

• ABC News in Nevada/New Jersey/ Tonight the U.S. House of Representatives will close their offices from today through Tuesday to allow for a full investigation into traces of anthrax. And 29 employees in Senator Tom Daschle's office have tested positive for anthrax. / The letter to NBC and The New York Post was the same. This is next. Now take penicillin. Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is good. The letter to Senator Tom Daschle had similar wording. / You can't stop us. We have this anthrax. you're dying now, are you scared? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is good. They all bore the date 9/11 above. They all shipped from Trenton, New Jersey. / I don't have anthrax and / Good morning. President Bush tries to reassure the nation after anthrax is found in a facility that handles mail going to the White House. / President Bush calls the people who send these anthrax letters "rogues" and says any attempt to terrorize this country will fail.

So you can see how it played out over the course of six weeks. It started with one person, one case, and over the course of six weeks, more and more letters appeared, and finally President Bush said it was done by crooks. It was called biological warfare. It is said to be the largest and worst biological weapons attack ever carried out on American soil. You can imagine the role this played in the escalation of fear Americans already felt as a result of the 9/11 attack.

At the end of October, when these many attacks had already taken place, there was almost literally nothing the government could demand that the American public did not immediately agree to, as long as these new powers were described as necessary to keep us all safe. That's how the populace was scared overnight, not just because of the 9/11 attack, but because of these anthrax attacks, and they had no idea who carried them out, they said.

But soon the media began to claim, as a result of high-level government sources, that they began to know who they believed was the most likely suspect in these attacks. According to these media reports, it appeared that the government disclosed that they had discovered bentonite through the analysis of the anthrax strains.

Bentonite sounds like a very scary and very advanced substance in fact it's actually the clay that holds kitty litter together because the challenge with weaponized anthrax is it's extremely light and likely to spread so to make it into a weapon do you need to find a way to group it so that it only spreads when touched or moved, e.g. when an envelope is opened. And according to these reports, the use of bentonite in armed anthrax was carried out by only one person on the entire planet. It happened to be the hallmark, they said, of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, with whom many of the same people who claimed this wanted to go to war and overthrow his government years before 9/11 and the anthrax attacks began. perfect attack to hit him by whitewashing anonymous claims to the media that he was guilty. It's hard to overstate how often this was done, and with how safely.

Probably the worst offender in the beginning was ABC News. Investigative reporter Brian Ross made repeated appearances on the network's newscast of perhaps the most trusted anchor of the day, Peter Jennings, and continually blamed Iraq. Let's see an example.

(Video. ABC World News Tonight. 26 oktober 2001)

Peter Jennings: […] ABC News has learned that the initial anthrax tests sent to Senator Daschle found a telltale chemical additive whose name means a lot to weapons experts. It's called bentonite, a substance that keeps tiny anthrax particles suspended in the air by preventing them from sticking together. Other countries may also use it, but it is a trademark of Saddam Hussein's bioweapons program.

"To me, that means Iraq becomes the prime suspect as the source of the anthrax used in these letters."

So here you have a major TV network, and in those days cable wasn't as influential as it once was; It's not very influential now, but it was far from its peak. The network news format is really where it all mattered, where it all happened. And possibly the most trusted program began brushing aside this claim over and over: "Iraq was the most likely suspect," "this was a signature and telltale sign of the Iraqi weapons program," and the fact that this happened when the Americans had very little defense Of course, when we were in a state of great fear, and desperate to find out who was attacking our country in such heinous ways, such claims were immediately accepted.

After 9/11, David Letterman, then the highest-rated late-night comedy show, quit because he felt it was inappropriate to do a comedy show and make jokes in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack and the anthrax attack. When he returned, one of his first guests was Senator John McCain of Arizona. It had good ratings because it was the return of David Letterman; It wasn't the first show, but it was one of the first shows, and of course it was the show that Americans were interested in. John McCain was heralded as one of the most knowledgeable and important foreign policy experts. And we're going to show you what he told David Letterman about the anthrax attacks.

(Video. D. Letterman Show. October 2001)

John McCain: The second phase is Iraq. There are some clues, and I don't have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax, I see, may have come from Iraq.

D. Letterman: Is that so?

John McCain: Yes.

So there you see John McCain. He's not definitive about it, but he certainly says Iraq is the most likely or one of the main culprits to constantly put on the air that when we think of anthrax attacks, it was almost certainly Saddam Hussein who did it. And it's based on a "highly technical and complex analysis" conducted at the highest levels of the US government that revealed the telltale sign of Iraqi bioweapons and the use of anthrax, which is bentonite. That was the claim made time and time again. In October, John McCain showed up with his then-running mate, the neoconservative Democratic Senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman, who just nine months earlier had been the vice presidential nominee running against Al Gore on the ticket he lost to George Bush and Dick Cheney . in the extremely close race. And here you see Joe Lieberman right next to John McCain, according to everything John McCain had to say. Joe Lieberman, like John McCain, was two of the people, along with Joe Biden, who had long advocated for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein long before the 9/11 attack. They continued, "Meet the press." It is clear that many Americans watched that program at the time. This is just six or five weeks after the 9/11 attack. And listen to what they said.

McCain: I think an envelope was recently received in Rio, which gives me the idea that maybe it's an international organization and not in the United States.

Lieberman: I have mixed reports, but I'll tell you what I found. And this is consistent with all the reports given to me. Most of the material sent, including that sent to Tom Daschle's office, is significantly refined anthrax. In other words, when we hear the stories about anthrax in labs across the country, it's actually bacteria in a lab tube. dr. Fauci [Dr. Anthony Fauci] can give you more details on that.

If we take it out of that, it takes real effort to turn it into stuff that ships in envelopes, and frankly more than a few people in someone's kitchen shaking things up.

So he tells me there's a significant amount of money behind this, or it's state sponsored, or it's stuff stolen from the old Soviet program.

(The Washington Post. October 21, 2001)

On October 14, 2001, The Guardian headlines: "Iraq 'behind US anthrax outbreaks','” No warnings, no uncertainty, a bold statement quoting an unknown person that we should blame Iraq. We have to assume that this is Saddam Hussein attacking the United States in memos in a cowardly and ethically casual way.

US researchers investigating the anthrax outbreaks in Florida and New York believe they have all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack and have named Iraq as the prime suspect for the source of the deadly spores. Their investigations add to what American hawks say is a growing body of evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved, possibly indirectly, in the 9/11 hijackers. (The Guardian. October 14, 2001)

So, you see, they didn't just use the anthrax attacks to claim that Saddam did it. They used it to claim that Saddam had an alliance with al-Qaeda, which of course was necessary to convince the Americans to invade Iraq.

Indeed, a poll at the time, six months after the invasion, showed that 70% of Americans, 70%, believed that Saddam Hussein had been personally involved in planning the 9/11 attacks. There was Jeffrey Goldberg, who has since been promoted to one of the most important and prestigious jobs in journalism, was a correspondent for the New Yorker at the time, and wrote articles claiming that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Al Qaeda. Jeffrey Goldberg is, of course, part of the neoconservative camp that has long sought to overthrow Iraq. See how they used these events to advance an agenda they've long wanted to carry out?

U.S. intelligence believes Iraq has sufficient anthrax technology and supplies for terrorist use. "They don't do these things in caves in Afghanistan," the CIA source said. "This is prima facie evidence of state intelligence involvement. Iran may have the capability, but it doesn't seem politically likely. It's leaving Iraq. (The Guardian. October 14, 2001)

That's about as definitive as it gets.

It turns out that this CIA source and all these whitewashed sources through The Guardian and other sources turned out to be right: there was a government involved, a very sophisticated government. And if you think about this armed anthrax, it turns out that it was not Iraq or Iran, but the United States.

On June 1, 2002, as we prepare for the question of whether we will invade Iraq, there is an article in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch entitled "Does al-Qaeda have anthrax? Better assume yes.”

Al Qaeda operatives and allies no doubt have something in mind for the United States. Something ugly. Vice President Dick Cheney said in May that it is "almost certain" that terrorists will strike again. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has warned that terrorists will inevitably get their hands on weapons of mass destruction and "will not hesitate for a minute to use them."

QUESTION What if they have already used them and are preparing to do so again? Was last year's anthrax attack, which left five dead, a foretaste?

In November, the FBI released a suspicious profile identifying the likely anthrax attacker as a single adult male, likely an American with a scientific background, lab experience, poor social skills and grudges. Some people, including me, viewed this interpretation with skepticism. What would be the reason? Why is the timing so close to 9/11?

Several analysts, including David Tell in a helpful article in The Weekly Standard on April 29, have since cast doubt on the disgruntled scientist's hypothesis, and an FBI spokesperson said in May that the agency is "far from convinced" that the attacks were executed. . ruled out by a lone American, "they did not rule out any category of suspect, motive or theory." Suggestions that anthrax and Al Qaeda may be related are, if anything, harder to ignore. (The Atlantic. June 1, 2002)

All of this increased significantly from highly influential media such as ABC News, Meet the Press, The Guardian, John McCain, Joe Lieberman to a presidential statement when George Bush delivered his State of the Union address in early 2002, in January of that year. address as infamously written by neocon David Frum it was the speech that infamously proclaimed that we were fighting an "axis of evil" made up of Iraq, Iran and North Korea because these neocons weren't content with just going to Iraq come and overthrow Iraq. They also wanted to overthrow the government of Iran in the name of 9/11 and anthrax. And here's how George Bush takes this claim and elevates it to a State of the Union address.

(Video. G. Bush State of the Union. 2 januari 2002)

President Bush: Iraq continues to show hostility to the United States and support terrorism. The Iraqi regime has been colluding for more than a decade to develop anthrax, nerve gas and nuclear weapons. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to kill thousands of its citizens and left the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children.

So that was David Frum's job: to spread outright lies designed to convince Americans that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were responsible for these anthrax attacks, as part of the effort that was already underway just weeks later. September 11. It was barely three months. after 9/11 to prepare Americans to blame 9/11 on a state that was not involved in the 9/11 attacks or the anthrax attacks, namely Iraq. Do you see this barrage of lies? How was it whitewashed by the same media outlets that still claim to be the only one to be trusted, produced by the same people who ended up being constantly promoted and uplifted? David Frum is also on The Atlantic with Jeffrey Goldberg. Bill Kristol is a welcome guest on CNN and MSNBC, a hero of American liberalism. George Bush has been fully rehabilitated, just like Dick Cheney, thanks to the liberal cult of his daughter, Liz Cheney. And the CIA continues to be a very reliable source for the American media, which just leaks them anonymously, as they've done over and over here, and just constantly believed.

At the time, there was every reason to believe that this was a lie. For starters, it's not just that bentonite is an extremely common substance, as I mentioned, it's what is used to make cat litter. The idea that it's a specialized ingredient that only advanced Iraqi scientists can use to weaponize anthrax was a joke from the start. But the much more important point is that there has never been a government analysis, as ABC News eventually admitted, that discovered the presence of bentonite. A completely false story from the start.

The sources who went to ABC News and told ABC News that bentonite was discovered in the government analysis flat out lied. If you go to journalism school or read books about journalism, you will read, among other things, that the only taboo in journalism is to reveal who your sources are if you promise them anonymity. You may recall during Russiagate that it was supposed to be a sacred principle, so sacred in fact that American journalists should go to jail for not disclosing their sources, even when ordered to do so by a court. And American journalists have previously been convicted of disobeying court orders. This is how sacred this principle is during Russiagate. An obviously sick blogger named Marcy Wheeler had promised anonymity to one of her sources, but became convinced, uneasy, that this source was some kind of smoking gun, a crucial piece proving conspiracy between Trump and Russia. in 2016 and without ever being asked, much less ordered, to reveal the identity of his secret source, he asked Mueller's team and the FBI to give him a few minutes. Fantasizing that she was part of Mueller's team and that she had irrefutable evidence of conspiracy in her hands, she offered to reveal the greatest taboo to her own source, to whom she had promised anonymity. in all journalism, and an American journalist applauded her. People like Margaret Sullivan, then the media reporter for The Washington Post and CNN, wrote articles glorifying what this woman, this clearly unhinged woman, had done. It turns out she is looking for her source. It wasn't even mentioned in the Mueller report. He was not involved in this. It was all a sick fantasy he had made up in his head. She wanted to be part of Mueller's team and they applauded for that. They did. The American media applauded someone who voluntarily, unsolicited, let alone summoned, revealed his own source. And to this day she is like a dead end or the Russiagator's favorite. But in general it has always been a very sacred ethical precept: you never reveal the identity of your sources to whom you prove anonymity, except in the event that it becomes not only permitted, but also obligatory and ethically binding to disclose the identity. to make. your anonymous sources, and that's when they knowingly lie to you, when they use you to spread lies to the public that they know are lies at the time. And there is no question that the three or four leading sources that Brian Ross claimed came to him to tell him that government tests had discovered bentonite were deliberately lying to him as a way of trying to convince the American public of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. blame the anthrax attacks because these are the same people in the government who were so eager to invade Iraq long before 9/11.

I've been bugging ABC and Brian Ross about this for two years. How come they continue to protect the identities of these senior officials who, on one of the most critical issues of our time, lied to ABC News and all those other sources? You had Joe Lieberman and John McCain and The Guardian and finally George Bush through David Frum's speeches spreading the same lie that led to the Iraq War. How can the identity of these people be protected? ABC eventually, as a result of this harassment, admitted that the stories were false, admitted that there had never been any government disclosure of the presence of bentonite, and eventually retracted it. But to this day they refuse to reveal their own sources who lied to them. High-level government sources. This is why the people of the CIA, FBI and Homeland Security know that they can deliberately lie to the media without any accountability, because they do so while hiding behind this shield of anonymity. So even if you know they lied, the media will protect these liars, people who deliberately mislead the public through the use of their media platforms, even though it's Journalism Ethics 101 that you have not only a right but an obligation to to unmask. sources that do. They never do this because they don't want to lose their sources, even if they know those sources are giving them false information, at least they are still someone giving them stories.

Aside from the fact that it was all a lie from the start, the whole basis for blaming Iraq for what all these people have done is the reality that everything we knew about the anthrax strain would have led us to believe that it was a government involved, but not Iraq or Iran or al-Qaeda, but the US government, because the report suggested that the tribe sent was the Ames tribe, and the reality was that it was a telltale sign of a government that used anthrax as a weapon. was a telltale sign from the United States. The Ames strain was a strain developed by the US government in Army laboratories. In 2011, Frontline made a documentary on PBS about anthrax attacks. They interviewed one of the most prestigious microbiologists in the country and he talked about what he discovered in 2001 about the possible source of this anthrax. Listen to him and what he said.

(Video. PBS Frontline. 2011)

Out: When they looked at the FBI traces, they were stunned. They all came from a single anthrax tribe, the Ames tribe.

Speaker 2: We were surprised that it was the Ames tribe, and at the same time it was creepy.

Speaker 3 Because it was very virulent. The Ames strain was the anthrax of choice for the U.S. military's biological weapons vaccine program.

From: When he heard it was the Ames variety, he started thinking, Oh, this doesn't sound like an outside job, it sounds a lot more like an inside job.

The home of the Ames strain was the Heart Suites in Maryland at USAMRIID.

So think about what that means. The public was inundated with outright lies about these anthrax attacks, based not on error, not on a bona fide misinterpretation of the data, but on an outright statement that bentonite had been discovered in these species, something that never happened. and who caused the highest levels of government and the most influential mainstream media to spread a most pernicious, destructive and poisonous lie to the public linking Saddam Hussein to these anthrax attacks. And not only was it based on lies, not only was it completely untrue, but as the scientist just explained, there was every reason in the world to know in 2001 for those analyzing anthrax strains that by far the most serious culprit was probably, no, it's not just the U.S. government, but the specific microbiology lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the U.S. Army lab that, eight years later, finally blamed the FBI, saying it was in fact the source of these attacks to get to.

The other part of this is that what this means, what he just said, what the FBI is now claiming is that the US military, the US government, have developed extremely virulent strains and very deadly anthrax. Why do it? We have been hearing from the US government for the past three years during the COVID pandemic that they are not doing such research. When Victoria Nuland accidentally went to the US Senate and admitted that there were very dangerous and advanced biolabs in Ukraine, they were very afraid that they would fall into Russian hands, which meant that they couldn't just be old Soviet labs because the Russians though they wanted. This would mean that they were new species of very dangerous biological strains in Ukraine. The answer came when people like me noticed what she said, "Oh, that's a crazy conspiracy theory. We don't research offensive biological weapons. We're banned by convention. We signed up to do that. It's something that China does. It's something Iran and Russia do, we don't." And yet one of the things that the anthrax episode revealed, and that's one of the reasons they worked so hard to make sure you don't know and forget, was that it was proof that there were tribes. Highly virulent deadly forms of anthrax are researched, developed and stored in US military laboratories. That is the FBI's own version of events. Now they justify it by saying, okay, okay, we're doing this research, but we're not doing it because we intend to use it offensively against someone. We only do this because we need to manipulate these tribes and make them more deadly so that we can explore defenses against them if one of the bad countries breaks the convention and does so anyway. But who knows what his intention was?

What we know for sure is that they are developing these types of biological weapons and making them more deadly and dangerous, exactly what Anthony Fauci denied when it came time to talk about the origins of the COVID pandemic. He said we would never do gain-of-function research. We would never take dangerous agents and make them more deadly, even though we have learned that this is exactly the kind of research that is done in the Wuhan lab with US funding. But the anthrax attack puts a lot of weight on these issues, and that's one of the main reasons they wanted you to forget about it.

To give you a few examples of how dangerous these guys ended up getting because of anthrax and the lies about its origin. let me show you onearticleby Maureen Dowd, September 26, 2001, about the panic everyone she knew had in Washington as a result of these anthrax attacks. This is about the anthrax attacks, not 9/11,

After all those grueling years of fighting everyday germs and inevitable deaths with advanced products, Americans now face the specter of terrorists in crop spreaders and dangerous garbage trucks spreading truly terrifying deadly toxins such as plague, smallpox, blisters, nerve agent and botulism. Women I know in New York and Washington debate whether they are Israeli vs. Marine Corps gas masks and half our light vs. $400 respirators, eight-hour respirators, infant respirators, and pet respirators with equal consideration. carefully given when ordering no lattes no foam no grease no whip on more innocent days. They share information about which pharmacies still have Cipro, Zithromax, and Doxycycline, all antibiotics that can be used against anthrax, in the same way they once exchanged tips about designer shoe deals. There is now more talk of real botulism than the fashionable cosmetic derivative, botox. Judy Miller, a Times reporter who is one of the authors of the new surprise bestseller "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War," said she's been getting a deluge of calls from people asking how to protect yourself. "It's the last scare," he said. (The New York Times. Sept. 26, 2001)

So here you have a real time article from 2001 about the intense level of mania and panic these anthrax attacks caused and you can only imagine the effects of linking these attacks to Saddam Hussein in Iraq based on outright lies when they actually happened. by the US government itself, while there were people within the US government who very aggressively and effectively exploited these anthrax attacks for their own purposes, i.e. to achieve their long-held goals, time to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein .

Here's a similar article by liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen. He wrote a column in 2004 entitled "our forgotten panic,where he tries to justify why he supported the war in Iraq and tries to say it's 2004, let's go back to 2001 and remember how scary it all was. And to get you to this, it didn't focus on the 9/11 attacks, it focused on the anthrax attacks. This is what he said.

At the time, Stevens' deaths and those that followed seemed to be somehow related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It made sense since the first letters containing anthrax spores were sent around this time, and perhaps more specifically the authorities originally said so. "It is suspected that this is related to international terrorists," said the spokesman. The White House, Ari Fleischer. House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt echoed him: "I don't think there's any way to test it, but I think we all suspect it." Iraq was one of the suspects. It was believed to have a bioweapons store.

I mention anthrax for the simple reason that nobody does it anymore. It's a strange silence because, along with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, it almost dominated the news. Some of us didn't get mail delivery, and when they started again, we went to secure rooms where we put on latex gloves and face masks before opening letters. As a tip, I asked my doctor early on to prescribe Cipro, only to find that even though I thought I was an informant, almost everyone had asked for the same thing. People made anthrax resistant chambers and a woman I know had a mask made for her dog.

My point is that we panicked. However, that panic is never spoken about. Last month, The New Republic published a "special issue" in which a group of very good writers questioned whether they had been wrong to support the war in Iraq. Most of them admitted to having misunderstood this or that detail or not understanding how poorly George Bush will lead the war of occupation. But none of them confessed to being seized by the Zeitgeist. I read the magazine from cover to cover and unless I overlooked it, the word anthrax never came up. To suggest! Not once! None of these authors admitted to panicking about anthrax.

I did well. I'm not sure panic is the right word, but it's close. Anthrax played a role in my decision to support the Bush administration's desire to remove Saddam Hussein. I linked it to anthrax, which I linked to 9/11. I wasn't about to sit still and just wait for another attack, more attacks. I wanted to go to the source, Hussein, and get him before he could get us. As time went on, I grew more and more curious, but I struggled to pull back from my first battle cry. (Richard Cohen. The Washington Post. July 24, 2004)

Here's one of the longest-serving and most influential liberal columnists at a newspaper in the United States, The Washington Post, admitting that part of the reason he urged his liberal readers to support the war in Iraq was panic. , mainly because of the panic spread by these anthrax attacks. You see him talking about people with obsessive gas masks, as Maureen Dowd put it, people who were terrified that they would be killed in their own homes. And the perception that was deliberately cultivated, the false perception by the same people, the same institutions, the same media, who constantly lied to us now that this came from Iraq.

As I said, there was a large faction in Washington that long before 9/11, years before 9/11, wanted to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein. And while we often talk about the neocons as the people who wanted it, one of the people who wanted it is called Joe Biden. Here's an audience in 1998. So more than three years before the 9/11 attacks, where you interrogate Scott Ritter, who was a weapons inspector in Iraq. And Joe Biden tells in 1998 how important he thinks it is to get Saddam out.

(Video. C-SPAN. 1998)

Chairman: The most senior minority member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the opening statement you wish to make.

J. Biden: Thank you, Mr. President. Let me start by saying that I believe that the mayor you provided has provided and is delivering a very, very, very valuable service to your country by standing up as you have because I honestly think that what you have done, what you have done is finished. have done. they forced us to come here for our milk, all of us in the US Congress. I think you and I think and many of us here think that as long as Saddam is in command there is no reasonable chance that you or any other inspector can guarantee that we have moved, rooted and branched out. of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program. And you and I know, and we all know it here, and that's what we have to face, that the only way, the only way we can get rid of Saddam Hussein is that we end up. It started on its own, it started on its own, and it's going to take guys like you in uniform to go back into the desert to get the son of a bitch, take down Saddam. You know it and I know it. So I don't think we should fool ourselves here. There are tough, tough options.

Please. That was the official position in the Clinton administration before 9/11. The US should invade Iraq and do everything possible to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Joe Biden was one of its loudest advocates during the Clinton administration. We just showed you that video from 1988 where he did just that. And, of course, Biden became probably the most important senator in 2000 to build enough support in the US Senate, as the Democratic leader of the Foreign Affairs Committee, where he became advocates along with Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. down by Saddam. And the anthrax attacks were one of the main reasons they were able to convince much of the public that it was necessary.

The neocons in Washington: Bill Kristol, David Frum and we show you the names on this list, which was called PNAC. He was the leading neoconservative think tank or organization at the time: He wrote a letter to President Clinton in January 1988 urging President Clinton to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein. They were exactly the same people. Three years later, we stand behind the lies blaming Iraq for the anthrax attacks. Here is the letter to Bill Clinton.

Dear Mr President,

We are writing to you because we are convinced that the current US policy towards Iraq is failing and that we will soon face a greater threat in the Middle East than we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your next State of the Union address, you will have the opportunity to set a clear and determined course of action in dealing with this threat. We urge you to seize this opportunity and present a new strategy that will safeguard the interests of the United States and our friends and allies around the world. The main aim of this strategy should be to oust Saddam Hussein's regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.

The only acceptable strategy is one that excludes the possibility that Iraq could use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction in the short term. This means that the will to intervene militarily when diplomacy clearly fails. In the long run, this means that Saddam Hussein and his regime are removed from power. It must now become the goal of US foreign policy. We urge you to make this goal clear and focus your government's attention on implementing a strategy to remove Saddam's regime from power. (PNAC. Jan. 26, 1998)

And you see the leading neocons there, including Elliott Abrams and William Bennett and John Bolton, and Robert Kagan, who is the husband of Victoria Nuland, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woosley, the former director of the INC. the standard group in Washington who harassed everyone about regime change in Iraq for years before 9/11, and then became the leaders of this lie, blaming the anthrax attacks on the country they wanted to invade.

As I said I started reporting this story a year earlier at least the FBI announced they finally caught the real shooter who they said was a bioweapons researcher at Fort Dietrich Bruce Ivins who we are now going to let to see. You. And the reason I started reporting on this was because when I went back and started looking at the anthrax attack and realized how aggressive the story was, they had the evidence connecting it to Saddam Hussein's government and how important that was, especially ABC News to distribute. Unpleasant. lie.

Honestly, as someone who actually started my journalism career, it was in 2007, a year and a half after I started writing about politics, that I was outraged by it. This was part of my realization of how radically corrupt these institutions really are. I couldn't believe it, I didn't remember. I wasn't really paying attention to the details then, the big details of it all. I worked as a lawyer; I was not a journalist. I couldn't believe how often and decisively ABC News spread this lie. And what I couldn't believe was that they weren't willing to tell us who in the government was spreading this lie and using ABC News to spread this lie. So this is one of the first stories I wrote about it. It was titled "Unsolved ABC News story is fake Saddam-Anthrax reports' and the subtitle read: 'In October 2001, ABC News ran highly inflammatory and false reports linking Saddam to the anthrax attacks. Who was behind these claims and why did ABC not retract its stories? And here's the article:

ABC aggressively promoted it as a feature story for days during its highly provocative period. That and these are all the quotes:

1. "the anthrax in the tainted letters sent to Tom Daschle, the Senate Majority Leader, were laced with bentonite"

2. bentonite is a "concerning chemical additive that authorities considered their first major clue so far"

3. "Only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons"

4. bentonite is "a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program"; And

5. "The anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is almost identical to samples found in Iraq in 1994, and the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those found in Iraq in 1994 when observed with an electron microscope. microscope".

At various times, Ross attributed these claims to three well-placed but separate sources, and alternatively to "at least four well-placed sources". All of these factual claims, taken individually, were completely false, demonstrably, and beyond question.

Ross claimed at the time, and there is no reason to doubt, that these false reports, clearly intended to blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks in the eyes of the Americans, had been supplied to him by "at least four well-placed sources. "

Who were the many well-placed sources feeding ABC News with wholly fictional claims linking Saddam Hussein to the anthrax attacks, including false claims about the government's findings? What possible justification is there for concealing the identities of those who manipulated the ABC to spread these fictitious claims? Peter Jennings, the highly trusted ABC News anchor, added the end of the story. Remember, this is October 2001.

This news about bentonite as a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program is very important, in part because there has been a lot of internal and external pressure on the Bush administration to go after Saddam Hussein. And some will quickly see this as a smoking gun. There is a battle for Iraq going on in the administration. (G. Greenwald. Apr. 9, 2007)

I just want you to step back and think about the fact that all along this anthrax attack has been used to frighten Americans into a state of panic beyond what 9/11 could do and that the claim at the highest levels spread. from politicians and the media that completely fictional evidence had strongly suggested, if not proven, that Iraq was behind it, the country they wanted to invade four years before 9/11, at least according to what the FBI says now: this Anthrax actually came from a US Army laboratory where it was developed, stored and stored. It was sent by a US Army bioweapons expert, a microbiologist, who, unfortunately for everyone, was about to arrest the FBI, commit suicide and free the FBI from pursuing these claims in court. These are pretty flashy events. And again, I'm not citing obscure media, not conspiracy media, but I'm citing conspiracy media, they're just not known for being that way, I'm citing the more mainstream, again, the louder. The establishment (government and politics) is behind all these lies.

Here's something that has been lost to history and I think it's worth mentioning. In 2008, Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist I quoted earlier, who said anthrax played a critical role in the panic that led him to support the Iraq War, went to Slate as part of a symposium at which a group of media and government advocates advocated the war in Iraq in 2002 and 2003 went on to confront what they were doing wrong.

Here you can see Richard Cohen's article: “How did things go wrong in Iraq?The caption reads: "I thought we had a chance to stabilize an unstable region and I admit I wanted to fight back. And here's what Richard Cohen has to say about why he got Iraq wrong.

Anthrax. Do you remember the anthrax? No one seems to do that anymore, at least it's never mentioned.

The attacks were not entirely unexpected. Shortly after 9/11, I was told to get Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The information came to me indirectly from a senior official and I acted on it immediately. I used Cipro long before most people heard about it. (Blackboard. March 18, 2008)

Think about it. This is a longtime columnist at The Washington Post. He has been in the Washington establishment forever. He has all kinds of contacts at the highest levels of the US government because he has been used to spreading propaganda in The Washington Post for as long as anyone can remember. And, according to him, a senior official told him, as kind advice, to start carrying Cipro, the antidote to spotted anthrax, long before the anthrax attacks happened, before anyone had even heard of it. Who told you and why did they tell you? In particular, not just a variety of antibiotics, but the most commonly used specific for anthrax.

It's sort of a side note to the story that Richard Cohen himself has said that no one pressured him except me, as far as I know, to tell us who told them and how they knew to tell him. But according to Richard Cohen, someone in Washington at the highest levels of the US government strongly suspected that the anthrax attacks were now imminent.

Of course, the question of who did this lingered in the air for a while. It couldn't go unsolved forever. He killed five people. 11 other people were seriously injured. As I said, it was something that was constantly condemned. No attempt to make him forget can convince us that we will never know who did it. The FBI had to give us a statement for years. Not only did they obsessively focus on an Army bioweapons expert, a physicist named Steven Hatfill, who was the prime suspect, they also leaked it to the media. They leaked to Nick Kristof, to others, to the New York Times, and his reputation was destroyed. Everywhere he went, people assumed he was the anthrax shooter. He sued the FBI and in 2008 they had to pay him nearly $6 million and admit he was undocumented. So once that happened, when the prime suspect they leaked to the media was acquitted, the question became who really did it.

Here's a look from the Los Angeles Times when Steven Hatfill got paid: "Anthrax as suspected is paid"

The former army scientist who was the prime suspect in the deadly 2001 anthrax outbreaks agreed on Friday to receive $5.82 million from the government to settle his allegation that the Justice Department and FBI had violated his privacy and destroyed his career .

Dr Steven Hatfill, 54, who called then-Attorney General John Ashcroft a "person of interest" in the case in 2002, said the labeling and repeated leaks of details of the investigation to the media damaged his reputation.

For months in the atmosphere of fear that followed 9/11, Hatfill was under 24-hour surveillance and widely identified as the prime suspect in the country's first bioterror attack. However, he was never arrested or charged, and a federal judge presiding over his trial recently said that "there is not a shred of evidence to link him to the shipments." (Los Angeles Times. June 28, 2008)

So the person they tried to feed for years was finally exonerated completely, leaving the question of who did it. It wasn't until about five weeks after the US government paid Steven Hatfill that they came back and said, this time we really caught the real culprit. Unfortunately, he committed suicide.

Here from L.A. Times, comes the headline"Apparent suicide in case of anthrax.” This is August 1, 2008, just five weeks after the last article we showed you about the government paying Steven Hatfill for years of falsely denouncing him.

The top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died of apparent suicide in Maryland just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with the attacks, L.A. has learned . Time. Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who has worked for the past 18 years in the government's elite biodefense research labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, was notified of his impending prosecution by people familiar with Ivins, his suspicions, and the FBI investigation.

Ivins, whose name was not released as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in animal testing. Considered an expert microbiologist, Ivins helped the FBI analyze powdered material recovered from one of the anthrax-infected envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's Washington office. Ivans died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland after taking a massive prescription dose of Tylenol with codeine, said a friend and colleague, who declined to be named for fear the FBI would harass him. Federal investigators turned their backs on Hatfill, the only publicly identified "person of interest" for many years, eventually concluding that Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert Mueller changed the lead of the investigation in late 2006. (Los Angeles Times. Aug. 1). , 2008)

That's another interesting fact. This investigation was led by Robert Mueller. He was, remember, George Bush's FBI director after 9/11. He was the head of the FBI when the fake attack on Steven Hatfill happened, and then it took seven years, seven years before he claimed to have found the real killer, the real shooter. It happened, they say, that he was working right under their noses in the US Army's most advanced laboratory at Fort Detrick, working with anthrax spores to attack the country.

As I said, the FBI didn't have to present their case in court because the person was dead. And then the FBI explained how this happened, that it took them seven years to find the culprit, and explained their reasons for believing he did it through a series of press conferences and media leaks. And immediately, immediately, there is an extraordinary doubt. Again, not from people labeled conspiracy theorists or people used to doubting the FBI, but from the top political and scientific sources in the United States. Serious doubts about the FBI case. The evidence, by the way, made no sense, and scientifically, there were gigantic holes in what the FBI claimed.

Here's an article I wrote in 2009 titled "Remembering the Anthrax Attack" in which I summarized how many doubts had been raised by the kind of institutions that are rarely willing to question the veracity of the FBI.

Ideologically diverse sources have expressed serious doubts about the FBI's anthrax case. That leads a key congressman to demand an independent commission of inquiry. One of the two targets of the Senate attack, Senator Pat Leahy, flatly stated at a Senate hearing last September that he does not believe the FBI's case against Ivins and emphatically does not believe that Ivins acted alone. Republican Senator Arlen Specter told the FBI at the same hearing that they could never have secured a conviction against Ivins in court based on his case, plagued by so much doubt, and also demanded an independent review of the FBI evidence. . Republican Senator Charles Grassley has long been skeptical of the FBI's anthrax investigation and has expressed serious doubts about the case against Ivins. (See this interview I conducted with Senator Grassley last year.) The establishment's newest organ, The Washington Post Editorial Page, featured several editorials casting serious doubt on the FBI's case against Ivins and calling for an independent investigation. The New York Times editorial page echoed these views. Even The Wall Street Journal editorial, citing the FBI's "so long and so many mistakes," argued that "independent parties should review all evidence, especially forensic science," concluding that "this is an opportunity is for Congress to exercise legitimate oversight".

In the wake of the FBI charges against Ivins, the scientific journal Nature strongly stated in its editorial headline "Case Not Closed" and called for an independent FBI investigation into the case. After the FBI released some of its evidence against Ivins, The New York Times reported "growing doubts among scientists about the strength of the government's case." The Baltimore Sun detailed that "scholars and legal experts criticized the strength of the case and questioned whether it could have succeeded." Dr. Alan Pierson, director of the Center for Arms Control and the Nonproliferation Biological and Chemical Weapons Control Program, which represents many experts in the field, expressed many of the same scientific concerns and called for a full investigation.

So it took the FBI seven years, and when they claimed to have found the person who acted alone in this extremely politically valuable attack on American soil, they presented their evidence on the person who had just committed suicide, and they paid off. and the need to take it to court, they all said the same thing, and I mean all the institutions that normally honor the FBI and write what to say.

From "Nature", the prestigious scientific journal, comes the headline "case not closedand this is what he said.

Was it Bruce Ivins, a scientist gone wrong, who single-handedly orchestrated the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States? Or was the 62-year-old anthrax vaccine researcher in Fort Detrick, Maryland an emotionally unstable innocent whose profile made him a convenient scapegoat for the FBI? The jury is still out on these questions, or rather, would be if one had the chance to hear the evidence. Ivins' apparent suicide last month means there will be no trial, making it even more important that the government release the evidence it intended to use to fully indict him. Now.

On August 6, the FBI's parent company, the U.S. Justice Department, released what it described as hundreds of pages of evidence against Ivins and stated that it would close the case because it was happy to have her husband. But Ivins' lawyer, Paul Kemp, described those documents as "lots of innuendo and a staggering lack of real evidence." He has a point.

For example, many of the documents are simply search warrants, a reminder that despite extensive searches of Ivins' home and cars, the FBI found no physical evidence directly implicating him in the attacks. Likewise, the agency has no evidence to locate Ivins in the Princeton, New Jersey, mailboxes from which the anthrax-laden letters were mailed.

The core of the case against Ivins released so far is contained in just a few dozen pages of affidavits, only four paragraphs of which discuss what the FBI believes is the ultimate piece of evidence: genetic analysis of the cards' anthrax powder. . The FBI says it found four distinctive genetic mutations in the anthrax used in the attacks. It tested these mutations and isolates of the Ames anthrax strain from 16 national, government and university laboratories, along with laboratories in Canada, Sweden and the UK. In total, more than 1,000 samples were collected, of which only eight had all four mutations. , the statement said. Each of those isolates, he says, was directly related to a batch of strains called RMR-1029, which was created in 1997 and kept in a bottle at the US Army's Fort Detrick research facility. The statements described Ivins as "that party's sole guardian". Many other researchers had access to it. [It turned out that over 100 people had access to that vial.] But the FBI claims to have eliminated them all as suspects. The genetic analysis itself seems pretty solid. The FBI is working with some of the top outside scientists on anthrax, calling many of them on Aug. 18 to answer reporters' questions about the science.

The panel's researchers explained that none of the analytical techniques used in this case were known to be applicable only to anthrax drugs. Several peer-reviewed papers on forensic work have already been published and a dozen more are expected. While this openness about the techniques is commendable, neither the conclusions of the scientific analysis nor legal elements as decisive as the truth about the origin and treatment of the samples have been proven in court. So far, one side of the story has been heard: that of the prosecution. (Nature. Aug 20, 2008)

On August 8, the New York Times published an editorial titled "Identification of the anthrax killer”, and expressed very similar doubts. The New York Times isn't exactly known for questioning the US security situation.

The FBI seems confident it has finally solved the bitter case of who sent the anthrax-laced letters that killed five people in 2001. scientists have staged a brilliant coup after a bad start or prematurely declared victory, despite a lack of hard and indisputable evidence. Federal agents relied on advanced scientific evidence and painstaking investigative work to conclude that only Dr. Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide last week, may have manufactured and sent the anthrax used in the letters. They say newly developed tests enabled them to identify telltale genetic mutations […] (The New York Times. Aug. 7, 2008)

Does that phrase sound familiar to you? "Genetic Mutation Telling": This phrase was used seven years earlier by the government media to blame Iraq at the highest level. Now the FBI says it developed tests that allowed it to identify telltale genetic mutations in the anthrax and show it didn't come from Iraq or al-Qaeda, but from a "vial kept by Dr. Ivins in Army labs at Fort Detrick." in Frederick, Maryland.

More than a hundred people may have had access to the deadly substance, but over a four-year period, investigators gradually weeded out suspects until only Dr. Ivan's was back. However, none of the researchers' key claims have been proven in cross-examination or reviewed by outside specialists. It is imperative that federal officials release all of their records so that independent experts can assess whether the emailed anthrax was indeed identical to Dr. Ivins' stash and only this stash.

It is also critical that the officials go on to explain how they removed many other people with access to the material. There is no direct evidence of his guilt. No witness saw him pour pulverized anthrax into envelopes. There are no anthrax spores in your home or cars. No confession to a colleague or suicide note. There is no physical evidence linking it to the Princeton, New Jersey site where the letters are believed to have been sent.

Because Dr. Ivins committed suicide before he could be charged, the FBI's conclusions cannot be verified. Unfortunately, the firm has a history of building indirect cases that seem convincing at first but eventually fall apart. (The New York Times. Aug. 7, 2008)

In response to all this pressure, the FBI has volunteered, meaning they choose what scientific evidence to make available to an expert panel that was convened, what was an FBI expert panel, a panel that actually approved, and when this expert panel could finally Seeing what the FBI has long touted as scientific evidence, they came to the conclusion that it wasn't as convincing, let alone convincing, as the FBI had been claiming for years.

This is from 2011. From The New York Times. the head"Expert panel criticizes FBI's work in investigating anthrax letters".

A review of the FBI's scientific work in its 2001 investigation of the anthrax letters concludes that the agency overstated the power of the genetic analysis that linked the anthrax mail to a supply of Bruce Ivins, the Army microbiologist to whom FBI investigators gave the attacks for which they were blamed. . The review, conducted by a panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences, said genetic analysis "did not conclusively show" that the posted anthrax spores had grown from a sample taken by Dr. Ivins' laboratory in Fort Lauderdale. Dodge. However, he adds that the evidence is "consistent with and supports a link" between Dr. Ivins' vial and the anthrax attack.

The Academy's report faults the FBI for failing to use scientific methods developed between the 2001 broadcasts and its conclusion after Dr. Ivins' suicide in 2008, that he was the sole perpetrator... Many of his colleagues have flatly denied that Dr. Ivan's fault. . at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where he was seen as an eccentric but popular character. The academy's report is likely to renew FBI critics' claims that the agency was merely investigating Dr. Ivins' suicide to end the case. (The New York Times. Feb. 15, 2011)

The Washington Post also reported on the criticisms of this FBI-approved panel of experts. There's the February 2011 headline, "Anthrax Report Casts Doubt on Scientific Evidence in FBI Case Against Bruce Ivins."

For the FBI, the case of the anthrax killer is a never-ending investigation. Agents thought they had solved the mystery last year when they blamed the 2001 attacks on a deceased Fort Detrick scientist. But on Tuesday, another new problem emerged, with a panel of top scientists casting doubt on the FBI's key scientific evidence. A National Research Council report has questioned the power of genetic testing that the government said was conclusively linked to anthrax-infected letters that killed five people from a vial of deadly bacteria from Bruce Ivins. Tuesday's report questioned critical evidence: the link between anthrax spores in a vial labeled RMR-1029 stored at Ivins' Fort Detrick lab and anthrax from the attacks. The Justice Department report concluded that Ivin's collection of anthrax spores, which he had called his "final creation", was the "primary material" of anthrax used in the shipments. "The scientific connection between the material in the letter and flask number RMR 1029 is not as compelling as established in the Justice Department's investigative summary," said the $1.1 million FBI-commissioned report. The document added that "the genetic evidence is consistent and supports a link between the vial and the anthrax used in the attack." The 190-page document from the research division of the National Academy of Sciences praised the FBI's aggressive pursuit of new science. But he offered another possible explanation for the apparent connection between the letters and the Ivins jar, namely that some of the mutations identified in the letters may have arisen independently through a process known as parallel evolution. According to the report, this possibility "has not been thoroughly investigated" by the FBI.