2001 Anthrax Was US Military Bio-Weapons Strain

I have no idea if anyone has been following coverage of the emerging Anthrax scandal, but a piece run in Saturday’s edition of the New York Daily News provides a bit of a shocking primer…

“In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out, the Daily News has learned.

After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was “beaten up” during President Bush’s morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.

“They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East,” the retired senior FBI official told The News.

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, “There may be some possible link” to Bin Laden, adding, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden’s henchmen were trained “how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together.”

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. “Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with,” the ex-FBI official said. “They couldn’t go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next.”

As it turns out, 62 year old Army Scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins had been the prime suspect in a year long FBI investigation into the 2001 Anthrax attacks prior to committing suicide last week before he was to discuss a plea deal with authorities. Colleagues that worked with Ivins at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who have also been placed under immense scrutiny by the FBI, have since claimed that Ivins was innocent and that the pressure brought to bear by the agency led Ivins to kill himself. But the FBI claims that it possesses DNA evidence that links Ivins with the attacks.

While Ivins suicide has garnered some media attention, the fact that the strain of Anthrax used in the attacks was a lethal US military grade bio-weapons strain of the toxin has not been significantly highlighted – meaning that your average American still believes that the Anthrax attacks that came in the wake of 9/11 were part of a greater and ongoing terrorist plot.

That said; two vital questions have to be asked.

1) Was Ivins actually responsible or is there something more to all of this that could be far more damaging to the country?

2) Why hasn’t the fact that the Anthrax that was used in the attacks been widely reported as a US military bio-weapons strain, thus negating the possibility that the letters and packages sent containing the lethal spores were part of a greater al-Qaeda operation?

Like it or not, this is a very serious issue with regards to the falsehoods propagated by the Bush Administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Unfortunately, given the sensitive and classified nature of the military’s bio-weapons programs, the probability that an untainted investigation into the matter is unlikely.

More…

This article in yesterday’s Washington Post is also of interest.