Cold Case
My my. Congress would like to know if the FBI has made any progress in the last five-odd years toward solving America’s most notorious biological weapons attack. Just out of curiousity I suppose.
When historians recollect the first decade of the 21st Century in tranquility, they will find it impossible to overstate the political impact of America’s most conveniently unsolved crime. The September 11, 2001 massacres were bad, but it was the anthrax attacks the following month that ramped up the “madness” Atrios recollected the other day. 9/11 was a shock. The anthrax attacks made terrorism feel like a siege. I think it’s possible that, absent the anthrax attacks, the Bush Administration might have failed to gin up the entirely equivocal support for the Iraq War that it managed.
UPDATE: Corrected classification error in first paragraph. Biological weapons attack.
Comment by Nell —
December 13, 2006 @ 11:27 pm
Not to mention the way they cut off speedy mail delivery to Congress right as the Patriot Act was being railroaded through.
But who’s counting?
Comment by Barry —
December 13, 2006 @ 11:50 pm
Jim, Jim, Jim. What are we gonna do with you? (ed: ship him to Gitmo!). We all know that ‘there have been no terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11, due to Bush’s inspired leadership’ (quote not exact; sums up the thinking of the right-wingnutosphere).
Therefore it stands to (AM hateradio-level, or perhaps U Tenn Law School-level) reasoning that the DhimmicRat Kongress is *rewriting history itself*, to insert terrorist attacks into the US of A! The EvilocRats are tampering with Holy Time itself! Next, they’ll insert soy into our meat, and give us teh Gay!
Comment by nitpicker —
December 14, 2006 @ 7:17 am
bioweapons attack, from, iirc, from out of our own non-bioweapons producing BTWC-safe labs.
Comment by neil —
December 14, 2006 @ 9:02 am
Although I wasn’t in the DC area, I recall hearing that The Sniper also did a lot to foster an atmosphere of WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE, GOTTA DO SOMETHING. True?
Comment by jlw —
December 14, 2006 @ 10:01 am
The cleverest part of the anthrax attacks, I think, was hitting media outlets. By putting the cross-hairs directly on journalists, it helped “persuade” them to sign on without reservations to La Guerra en Terra.
Comment by matthew hogan —
December 14, 2006 @ 10:16 am
That is the other shoe; as I recall it was the anthrax attack, plus that accidental aircrash at Kennedy Airport that kept the stress at high level. And the plane crashing in Milan and Florida buildings.
One can almost track the stock market’s delayed rebound from 9-11 over October by the anthrax news.
Comment by jlw —
December 14, 2006 @ 10:43 am
Perhaps I should ammend and expand the previous comment just a bit. No one knows whether the Anthrax attacks were designed as a follow-up to the attacks of September 11. The timing of the first mailing is suggestive, but making the anthrax takes time, and putting together the plan for the attack and amassing the needed materials takes more time. Someone was working to do this months, maybe years before the fall of 2001.
This isn’t some guy rolling out of bed on September 12 and saying to himself, Hey! Let’s mail some bioweapons.
WIthout knowing the culprit, it’s impossible to know the motive with certainty. But the crude notes suggest that the perp wanted to provoke retaliation against Islamists. Maybe this was a false flag operation (not restricted to the U.S. Government or Israel, but also including Aryan nationalists, messianic Jews, Christian Zionists, Russian, Chinese or Indian operatives, or various other Pynchonesque characters). Maybe this was legitimately an Islamist operation, hoping to prod the U.S. into charging half-cocked into a land war in Asia.
Anyway, key to this plan was to sow anti-Islamist fear in the hearts of the elite media (and apparently the National Enquirer) who would then transmit it to the general population. Following up the September 11 attacks–by design or coincidence–the plan worked.
Comment by diana —
December 14, 2006 @ 11:35 am
Ab-so-lutely.
I remember it well. I realize that the anthrax attacks were in a variety of places but the main node was in NYC, which of course, is centrally connected by a network of underground tunnels called subways.
The anthrax attacks went on for months. There were numerous hoax calls and several “genuine” scares. You could not get on a subway without wondering whether there was going to be a Japanese-style poison gas attack. In retrospect that was ridiculous but at the time it seemed quite real.
The 59th Street-Columbus Circle stop, which is very large & has numerous exits & entrances, was blocked off, supposedly to facilitate orderly crowd control. Someone in the Transit Authority should study the ant colonies more closely.
We had to enter & leave through only two exits. About a month after 9/11, I witnessed my one and only panic scene in which someone lost it and set off a stampede. I was on an escalator going up and I thought I was going to die. Luckily people calmed down quickly and disaster was averted.
The whole atmosphere of post 9/11 NYC was one of suppressed hysteria and deep, deep fear. Mostly justified, but also reinforced for political reasons, as I now see.
What the hell were the anthrax attacks? Do you think we will ever know?
Comment by Nell —
December 14, 2006 @ 12:04 pm
Jim, thanks for posting this, because I see now that the Congressional Dems’ renewed interest in the case got very little, and mostly local coverage.
Francis Boyle, whose writing has more than a tinge of the fine crinkly effect, holds a specific FBI agent responsible for the destruction of the Ames lab anthrax material, thus making a match impossible. Crank or no, that claim of his should be followed up by Congress.
Comment by Nell —
December 14, 2006 @ 12:39 pm
Hm. The wikipedia article on the attacks is pretty informative, and causes me to demote Boyle’s charges even further.
However, my hopes for the forthrightness of any FBI briefing are dimmed by their admission that they weren’t honest with Daschle and Leahy in the first such go-round (covered in the wiki). Maybe now that most of the hysteria has ebbed…
Comment by Nell —
December 14, 2006 @ 12:47 pm
Or not. A Florida column on the Congressional request for info on the investigation notes that
Comment by Matt Weiner —
December 14, 2006 @ 12:50 pm
Has anyone come up with any explanation, other than “right-wing loony of some sort,” for targeting Leahy and Daschle — the two most prominent targets of talk-radio hate at the time?
Comment by Matt Weiner —
December 14, 2006 @ 12:55 pm
“Loony” is not intended to exclude any of the other categories. If someone in the US government were deciding to do a false flag (which I at the very least suspend judgment on), I could easily imagine those people being right wing loonies who would go after Democratic senators while they were doing it.
Comment by J. —
December 14, 2006 @ 9:54 pm
“solving America’s most notorious chemical weapons attack.”
Jim, Jim. First, it was a biological weapons attack, not a CW attack. Second, we didn’t invade Afghanistan because the Taliban might be letting al Qaeda brew chem-bio agents. Iraq’s WMD program was not connected to the 2001 anthrax attacks.
The anthrax attack was another Unabomber incident. We’re not going to find out who did it until his family or friends turn him in (and it was an angry white disgrunted male).
Comment by JRoth —
December 14, 2006 @ 11:45 pm
J. is simultaneously completely right and quite wrong. I’d lay as much money as I could get my hands on that it was a disgruntled white male. And of course anthrax had nothing to do with the desire to go after Afghanistan.
But imagine a world in which 9-11 happens, we knock out the Taliban, and Nice Muslim Karzai become President in colorful tribal garb. That’s a story with a simple arc, a happy ending, and a country ready to focus on locating sufficient tar and feathers to cope with Enron.
But instead, the anthrax made us feel like the invasion of Afghanistan was entirely ineffective – I cite Get Your War On as a contemporary document of American fear & paranoia: “Holy fuck – anthrax in NYC. We’re getting our fucking ass kicked.” “You know, us bombing Afghanistan isn’t doing shit, except somehow releasing anthrax throughout America.” Comic effect, obviously, but I think that captured very closely the effect of anthrax, and how it made us need to lash out more and more. Without it, maybe – just maybe – some cooler heads might have prevailed, instead of being swept up in hysteria.
Comment by Matt Weiner —
December 15, 2006 @ 11:21 am
Iraq’s WMD program was not connected to the 2001 anthrax attacks.
This is true if it means there was no causal connection. This is false if it means no one tried to publicly draw a connection. See and in general.
Comment by J. —
December 15, 2006 @ 12:08 pm
Matt – noted. Good point, certainly the administration (Cheney specifically) tried to connect Saddam and the 2001 anthrax attacks.
JRoth, unless my dates are off, our actions in Afghanistan (significant actions) were Nov 01-Jun 02, the anthrax attacks were in Oct 01. Just saying, there wasn’t a perception that Afghanistan wasn’t enough to “stop” terrorist WMD incidents. Iraq was more “well, Saddam might give it to other terrorists” – except he didn’t like the few Shi’ite terrorist groups interested in chem-bio hazards.