Unqualified Offerings Watch Watch
Unqualified Offerings can handle being caught in a rhetorical dodge, but it’s embarrassing being caught in a rhetorical dodge it didn’t know it was taking. In an e-mail headed “UO Watch,” reader/gaming buddy Greg Pearson writes anent the anthrax speculation item below to point out that, while all that stuff about “greymail” is very nice, greymail could apply to a pure-domestic or recruited-domestic anthrax suspect. Thus, UO still left its interviewer (also UO) hanging as to its real suspicions.
Greg is right. The hell of it is, this site didn’t think of that at the time. It was thinking of greymail purely in the context of a 100% domestic-scenario suspect. So UO thought it was saying that it still favors the domestic scenario, based on what it’s read so far.
Is that clear?
Greg also says a couple of other interesting things:
I don’t, to be honest, find the fact that he was in Iraq to be very interesting. If you’re Iraqi intelligence and you’re trying to recruit someone for a covert operation against the U.S., a high security, heavily guarded UN inspection mission doesn’t seem to be the ideal recruiting ground.
This gets an eh. If you’re Iraqi counterintelligence, you’d bend yourself to finding out everything you could about every UNSCOM inspector - not least because, as we’ve since learned, the CIA was using UNSCOM personnel to spy on Iraq and probably foment coups against Hussein. That would mean that if there was some pressure point in the life of an UNSCOM scientist that would make him an especially ripe recruiting target, they’d have a chance to find it. (For instance, if you were involved in a biological attack in the third world in your youth…)
But Greg’s right. The Iraq-recruits-a-germ-scientist scenario is far-fetched. What’s moderately less far-fetched? Greg again:
The fact that he was with UNSCOM, though, does interest me. Since its dissolution, former UNSCOM members (of whom Richard Butler is the most visible) have made something of a career of going on CNN and complaining that nobody (read “congress and the media”) takes the threat of bioterrorism seriously.
And then, what do we get? A small, limited bioterrorist attack targeting congress (which holds the federal purse strings) and the media (which dictates the national agenda). Lot’s of publicity for bioterrorism, not many people actually get hurt. Just what a nice, patriotic but disillusioned biowarrior might want to see. He has plenty of motive all on his own; why drag Iraq into it?
Greg even sees the problem with his own theory!
Of course, the great flaw in that theory is that it doesn’t really leave us with anyone to bomb.
Greg’s UNSCOM speculation is not far from some of the musings in the latest Barbara Hatch Rosenberg article, which UO has been meaning to blog for a few days. UO is sort of put off by the fact that Hatch Rosenberg works for the Federation of American Scientists. Bruce Rolston recently caught that organization out in an absurd hyping of the threat of a so-called “dirty bomb.” (Read Rolston’s piece! It’s a textbook example of the political weblog at its best.) However, Hatch Rosenberg’s name appears nowhere on the dirty bomb article, she’s been following the anthrax case since last fall and appears, on the basis of her article, to be very wired in to the investigation. (Note to Avedon Carol: I take it all back!)
