US anthrax suspect commits suicide as FBI net closes in

Bruce Ivins, a 62-year-old research specialist at the government's biodefence laboratory in Maryland, 40 miles north of Washington, has committed suicide just as federal prosecutors were preparing to charge him for the anthrax attacks which brought such fear to the US shortly after 9-11.

It is worth remembering how quickly some were to state that the most possible scenario was that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks:

It didn't take long for the hawks to seize on the anthrax scare as a justification for the United States to go bomb Iraq.

"By far the likeliest supplier is Saddam Hussein," The Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial on Oct. 18.

James Woolsey, former CIA director, said almost the exact same thing in the Journal's adjacent guest column. After speculating about Iran's involvement, he said: "But by far the more likely candidate for involvement with al Qaeda is Iraq."

Richard Butler, the bellicose leader of U.N. inspections in Iraq in the late 1990s, took to the op-ed page of The New York Times the same day to insinuate that Iraq was behind the attacks: "If the scientific path leads to Iraq as the supporter of the anthrax used by the terrorist mailers, no one should be surprised."

In an excellent article today, Glenn Greenwald points out the role which ABC News had in disseminating this theory:

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

As Greenwald points out, the persons who were feeding this story to ABC News were supposedly "three well placed but separate sources." If they were as "well placed" as ABC News claim then it is not unreasonable to presume that they were connected to the laboratory where the tests were being carried out. If the allegation against Ivins has any merits, then the well connected people that ABC News were relying on were people inside the very laboratory where the attacks were coming from.

ABC News are currently refusing to say who these "well placed but separate sources" were. How can ABC News continue to protect such persons when the information they were giving was utterly wrong? Indeed, it could be construed that this was some sort of smoke screen to put people off the fact that the anthrax attacks were coming from within the very laboratory which was testing the anthrax used in the American attacks.

Those anthrax attacks - and the implied links to Saddam Hussein made by many people - contributed to the fearful atmosphere which Scott McClellan reminds us in his new book was one of the main reasons that the Iraq war was authorised.

Here's John McCain discussing the possibility that the anthrax might be linked to Saddam Hussein:

LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

MCCAIN: I think we’re doing fine …. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase — if I could just make one, very quickly — the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.

LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?

MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that’s when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.

It's impossible to overstate how much the linking of the anthrax attacks to Saddam helped to fuel the rush to invade that nation and ABC News are now refusing to name the three "well-placed but separate" sources who helped to fuel the lie - and there really is no other word for what they were disseminating - which helped rush the US to invade a country which had not attacked them.

There are many of us who think the Bush regime were always going to attack Iraq, but ABC News certainly helped them make their case by putting into the American psyche the notion that bid bad Saddam was behind it all.

ABC News are now "protecting their sources" as they call it. But it will be quite astonishing if they seek to hold this line if it transpires that their sources were, indeed, people within the very government laboratory from where the attacks were emanating.

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Tags: Bruce Ivins, anthrax, Saddam Hussein, Iraq war, 9-11