The 2001 anthrax attack

The invaluable Marcy Wheeler reminds us that the 2001 anthrax case is still not solved in FBI’s Robert Mueller Still Engaging in an Anthrax Cover-Up Emptywheel 11/01/09. The 2001 anthrax attack is an actual case of the deployment of a so-called "weapon of mass destruction", a term which thankfully seems to be disappearing from the political vocabulary, or may that's my overly-hopeful read on it. We invaded Iraq in 2003 and are still at war there that was justified to the Congress and the public as a war to eliminate "weapon of mass destruction" that didn't actually exist.

Solving this actual case of a WMD attack on the US is one of the most important pieces of unfinished business left by the Cheney-Bush administration's to the Obama administration. And, I'm sorry to say, I haven't heard anything that makes me think they're making any progress on it. Marcy provides a number of links in her post on the problems with the FBI's current explanation of the 2001 attack:

As we have discussed at length, there are reasons to doubt the FBI’s conclusions that Bruce Ivins acted alone (more here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). Indeed, all the FBI has claimed it proved with its nifty new scientific analysis (and Mueller states this) is that Ivins made the strain used in the attack (I’ll leave it to the scientists to address Mueller’s certainty on that front). They certainly have not proven that Ivins mailed the anthrax. Which means, quite simply, they haven’t solved the case.

Meryl Nass has developed a lot of her work on the blog Anthrax Vaccine to the 2001 anthrax attack and the still-unresolved issues around it. (Her most recent posts have to do with other vaccine issues.)

Glenn Greenwald has written about this issue quite a bit, as well, as in Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News Salon 08/01/09. In that particular post, he focuses on the unresolved issues around the efforts by advocates of invading Iraq to tie the 2001 anthrax attack to Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Tags: anthrax, anthrax attack