The anthrax attacks that followed those of 9/11 have disappeared from public memory in ways analogous to the pulverization of the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building 7. For the towers, at least, ghostly afterimages persist, albeit fading like last night’s nightmare. But the anthrax attacks, clearly linked to 9/11 and the Patriot Act, are like lost letters, sent, but long forgotten. Such disappearing acts are a staple of American life these days. Memory has come upon hard times.
With The 2001 Anthrax Deception, Professor Graeme MacQueen, founding Director of the Center for Peace Studies at McMaster University, calls us back to a careful reconsideration of the anthrax attacks. It is an eloquent and pellucid lesson in inductive reasoning and deserves to stand with David Ray Griffin’s brilliant multi-volume dissection of the truth of that tragic September 11th. MacQueen makes a powerful case for the linkage of both events, a tie that binds both to insider elements deep within the U.S. government, perhaps in coordination with foreign elements.
MacQueen’s thesis is as follows: The criminal anthrax attacks were conducted by a group of conspirators deep within the U.S. government who are linked to, or identical with, the 9/11 perpetrators. Their purpose was to redefine the Cold War into the Global War on Terror and in doing so weaken civil liberties in the United States and attack other nations.
Obviously these are explosive charges that demand substantial evidence connected logically in a compelling thesis.
‘The following five classes of evidence should have been produced by U.S. authorities in September 2001 or shortly thereafter.
Not only does MacQueen provide copious documented facts to support his case, but he does it in a systematically logical way that leaves the official story in shambles. If a crime were being prosecuted (as it should, but war was waged instead), MacQueen marshals a case for conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.
Yet The New York Times, between September 12 and October 3, made reference to the possibility of biological or chemical terrorist attacks 76 times, 27 references specifically to anthrax. Many of these warnings came from government leaders. Of course the Times was home to Judith Miller, notorious for her deceptions regarding Iraq’s WMD, and whose book Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, was about to be published in the first few days in October. In that book Miller et al. assert that Iraq might use a terrorist group to unleash a bioweapon against the United States.
Just coincidentally, throughout the month of October as the anthrax attacks became public, the Bush administration and the mainstream media pushed the claim that Al Qaeda (already accused of 9/11) and Saddam Hussein (slyly implicated by innuendo) were responsible for the anthrax attacks. Once the U.S. started bombing Afghanistan on October 7, alleged Al Qaeda retaliation enhanced the claim. No evidence was presented. The Washington Post, vying with The New York Times for Cassadran bragging rights, had published a September 27 article “Al Qaeda May Have Crude Chemical Capabilities.” This double foreign group suggestion – that Bin Laden’s group, state-sponsored by Iraq, sent the anthrax spores – was promoted vigorously throughout October. The crude anthrax letters written to Tom Brokaw of NBC News and Senator Daschle with their 09-11-01 headings and Muslim extremist language, released to the public on October 23, seemed to clinch the case.
By October 26, once Bush had signed the Patriot Act, that case began falling apart, but not before the two Democratic Senators, Daschle and Leahy, who had resisted ramrodding the bill into law, had received their own lethal anthrax letters as possible reminders.
When R. W. Apple Jr. wrote a New York Times front page article on October 18, “City of Power, City of Fears,” and said, “the government has been caught completely by surprise by the anthrax attacks,” he may not have known about the exercise termed Dark Winter, conducted four months earlier on June 22-23, though one would think he might have known of the plethora of references to anthrax in his own paper in the few weeks before the attacks became known. Maybe he thought the Bush administration didn’t read the New York Times for intelligence.
And yes, not to be missed, we learn that Dark Winter’s simulation’s actors included Apple’s New York Times’ colleague Judith Miller, soon to be the New York Times best- selling author of Germs, playing a reporter for the New York Times; James Woolsey, former CIA Director and supporter of The Project for the New America Century (we’ll need a new Pearl Harbor, folks); and Jerome Hauer,a member of the Committee on the Present Danger, and “an important figure in the linking of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax attacks,” who played the FEMA director.
Once the government’s accusations against Al Qaeda and Iraq fell apart but the Patriot Act had become law, NSA spying commenced, and the war in Afghanistan proceeded apace, the FBI changed its tune and pursued the lone wolf perpetrator theory, first accusing a scientist named Steven Hatfill and then, after he sued and eventually received $5.82 million in compensation, they accused Bruce Ivins, a scientist working on an anthrax vaccine at Fort Derrick in Maryland. MacQueen shows in detail how that claim came apart and resulted in a case without credibility but with Ivins committing suicide. But, he concludes, the Ivins accusation served its purpose of diverting attention from the real reason for the anthrax attacks and its culprits.
But as few can forget, on February 5, 2003 at the UN Security Council, the Iraq/anthrax/crop-duster claim arose from its sleep in the infamous, fraudulent presentation by Colin Powell as he slyly tied Iraq back to the anthrax attacks and shilled for war against Iraq. That feat of propaganda was but one of at least 532 occasions when eight top members of the Bush administration made at least 936 false statements on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and its links to Al Qaeda, according to a study conducted by The Center for Public Integrity and the Fund for Independence in Journalism and released in 2008.
Anyone concerned about the truth behind 9/11 and the anthrax attacks should read this profoundly important book. It is filled with tight argumentation backed by solid evidence, and even the speculative parts ring true.
In closing I will mention MacQueen’s fascinating penultimate chapter wherein he speculates about the significance of the repeated word “unthinkable” by the media and government officials following George W. Bush’s use of the term “rethink the unthinkable” in a May 1, 2001 speech at the National Defense University. The mainstream media used the word “unthinkable” repetitively throughout October 2001 when referring to the anthrax attacks. And one of the early anthrax threatening letters sent to Tom Brokaw, begins: “The Unthinkabel” (sic) – showing, of course, how Muslim terrorists can’t spell English. “There is a pattern here,” MacQueen writes.
MacQueen has chosen sense through argument, and rather than dismissing his as unthinkable, thinking people everywhere should engage it.
The 2001 anthrax letter attacks in the United States killed five people and wounded dozens. They were widely blamed on extremist Muslims and their backers and used to support the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
They were also used to justify and hasten the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, which was being presented to Congress just as the first anthrax victim grew ill.
In October 2001, one of the hypotheses that gained ground was that of the Double Perpetrator, the claim that al-Qaeda was carrying out the attacks with the support of Iraq. Much evidence was put forth to support this Double Perpetrator hypothesis but independent scientists soon discovered that the anthrax spores came from a domestic lab in the US serving the military and intelligence communities, not from al-Qaeda or Iraq.
The FBI then quickly claimed that an individual was responsible for the attacks and began noisily looking for this “lone wolf.” In 2008 the Bureau named Dr. Bruce Ivins of the US Army Medical Institute of Infectious Disease as the “anthrax killer.” Although the FBI remains committed to the Ivins hypothesis, the case has been disintegrating for the last three years. Currently, it is justly held in contempt not merely by scientists who worked with Ivins but by many journalists as well as several US senators.
(a) The anthrax attacks were carried out by a group of perpetrators, not by a “lone wolf.” The attacks were, therefore, the result of a conspiracy—by definition a plan by two or more people, made in secret and resulting in an immoral or illegal act.
(b) The group that carried out this crime consisted, in whole or in part, of insiders deep within the US state apparatus.
(d) The anthrax attacks were meant to facilitate a seizure of power by the executive branch of government through intimidation of Congress and US civil society. They were also designed to achieve public acquiescence to and support for the redefinition of US foreign policy, replacing the Cold War with a new and aggressive global conflict framework, the Global War on Terror.