From: Mitchell Porter (mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Dec 14 2002 - 15:58:00 MST
Samantha Atkins said
>Get real. Mysterious insider information not shared with the people when
>the people are expected to fund the escapade to the tune of hundreds of
>billions and 250,000 troops? Even if your information was credible this
>would be soundly against any sane free country model. As it is, the
>investigations showed pretty conclusively this was US military lab made
>Anthrax. There is no connection to Iraq here whatsoever. And, as others
>have mentioned, Anthrax is a pretty ineffective bio-weapon. It cannot
>credibly "kill millions".
The virulent form of Ames strain (which is what was in the letters)
is known to have been shared with labs in Canada and the UK as well.
Last I heard, there were about half a dozen labs known to have
cultures, and genomic analysis had been unable to narrow the field
further than that. And Iraq has every reason to try to acquire Ames:
for several years it's been known that the US Army's anthrax vaccine
is much less effective against Ames than against the Vollum strain,
which Iraq is known to have acquired from a US repository. Iraq is
also on record as having tried to obtain Ames from the UK as long
ago as 1988 (although that may have been a nonvirulent substrain,
I can't tell).
Why would the Bush administration not shout from the rooftops that
it was Iraqi anthrax, at a time when they need public support for
a war against Iraq? I don't know how reliable the journalist Bob
Woodward is, but in his new book "Bush At War" (pp248-249) he reports
a conversation from a National Security Council meeting last October,
in which Cheney, his chief of staff, and CIA head Tenet discuss the
anthrax. They agree that it was probably Al Qaeda and probably
state-sponsored. Tenet says he won't bring up state sponsorship in
public, and Cheney says "It's good that we don't, because we're not
ready to do anything about it."
How do you mobilize a society to deal with a threat so great
that surrender is by far the easiest option? You frame it as a
hypothetical risk. You say it is imperative that rogue states not
be allowed to arm terrorist groups, and you keep 'em guessing as
to whether that already happened last October. You have the FBI
publicly hunt for a domestic anthrax terrorist, while not even
mentioning the Florida case (with its embarrassing proximity
to the hijackers) on its Amerithrax homepage. You play up vague
reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and you have
anonymous intelligence officials deny repeated assertions from
Prague that Mohammed Atta met there with an Iraqi spymaster.
A good case can be made for Iraqi sponsorship of earlier episodes
of terrorism in the USA (see the work of Laurie Mylroie and Jayna
Davis), so maybe there's also something darker at work. Maybe the
intelligence agencies tried to deal with those earlier attacks
covertly, but their opponent was only emboldened. However that may
be, I think the strategic dilemma I've just sketched is in itself
sufficient to explain why they'd prevaricate.
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