posted August 18, 2008 11:14 am
Tomgram: Six Questions about the Anthrax Case
Double Standards in the Global War on Terror
Anthrax Department
By Tom Engelhardt

Oh, the spectacle of it all -- and don't think I'm referring to those opening ceremonies in Beijing, where North Korean-style synchronization seemed to fuse with smiley-faced Walt Disney, or Michael Phelp's thrilling hunt for eight gold medals and Speedo's one million dollar "bonus," a modernized tribute to the ancient Greek tradition of amateurism in action. No, I'm thinking of the blitz of media coverage after Dr. Bruce Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, committed suicide by Tylenol on July 29th and the FBI promptly accused him of the anthrax attacks of September and October 2001.

You remember them: the powder that, innocuously enough, arrived by envelope -- giving going postal a new meaning -- accompanied by hair-raising letters ominously dated "09-11-01" that said, "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." Five Americans would die from anthrax inhalation and 17 would be injured. The Hart Senate Office Building, along with various postal facilities, would be shut down for months of clean-up, while media companies that received the envelopes were thrown into chaos.

For a nation already terrified by the attacks of September 11, 2001, the thought that a brutal dictator with weapons of mass destruction (who might even have turned the anthrax over to the terrorists) was ready to do us greater harm undoubtedly helped pave the way for an invasion of Iraq. The President would even claim that Saddam Hussein had the ability to send unmanned aerial vehicles to spray biological or chemical weapons over the east coast of the United States (drones that, like Saddam's nuclear program, would turn out not to exist).

Today, it's hard even to recall just how terrifying those anthrax attacks were. According to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. 4 and Dec. 4, 2001, 389 stories appeared in the New York Times with "anthrax" in the headline. In that same period, 238 such stories appeared in the Washington Post. That's the news equivalent of an unending, high-pitched scream of horror -- and from those attacks would emerge an American world of hysteria involving orange alerts and duct tape, smallpox vaccinations, and finally a war, lest any of this stuff, or anything faintly like it, fall into the hands of terrorists.

And yet, by the end of 2001, it had become clear that, despite the accompanying letters, the anthrax in those envelopes was from a domestically produced strain. It was neither from the backlands of Afghanistan nor from Baghdad, but -- almost certainly -- from our own military bio-weapons labs. At that point, the anthrax killings essentially vanished… Poof!... while 9/11 only gained traction as the singular event of our times....

F.B.I. Says It Obtained Reporters’ Phone Records
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: August 8, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday that it had improperly obtained the phone records of reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post in the newspapers’ Indonesia bureaus in 2004.

Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., disclosed the episode in a phone call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, and apologized for it. He also spoke with Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, to apologize.

F.B.I. officials said the incident came to light as part of the continuing review by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into the bureau’s improper collection of telephone records through “emergency” records demands issued to phone providers.

The records were apparently sought as part of a terrorism investigation, but the F.B.I. did not explain what was being investigated or why the reporters’ phone records were considered relevant.

Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News
Glenn Greenwald
Aug.1, 2008 05:36 EDT

Updated below Update II Update III Update IV Update V Update VI Update VII Update VIII)

The FBI's lead suspect in the September, 2001 anthrax attacks -- Bruce E. Ivins -- died Tuesday night, apparently by suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the attacks. For the last 18 years, Ivins was a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where he was one of the most elite government anthrax scientists on the research team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID).

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters -- with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 -- that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.

Kucinich campaign is awaiting ABC News explanations for its actions

The Kucinich campaign is still awaiting an official response from ABC News about the unexplained – some have charged "inexplicable" - way in which the network has handled its post-debate online coverage of Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich over the past few days.

Among the "outrages" that have energized tens of thousands of Kucinich supporters - and even non-supporters - thousands of whom have flooded the ABC News website and other online news sites with comments of protest:

• * Congressman Kucinich was apparently deliberately cropped out of a "Politics Page" photo of the candidates.
• * Sometime Monday afternoon, after Congressman Kucinich took a commanding lead in ABC's own on-line "Who won the Democratic debate" survey, the survey was dropped from prominence on the website.
• * ABC News has not officially reported the results of its online survey.
• * After the results of that survey showed Congressman Kucinich winning handily, ABC News, sometime Monday afternoon, replaced the original survey with a second survey asking "Who is winning the Democratic debate?"
• * During the early voting Monday afternoon and evening, U.S. Senator Barack Obama was in the lead. By sometime late Monday or early Tuesday morning, Congressman Kucinich regained the lead by a wide margin in this second survey.
• * Sometime Tuesday morning, ABC News apparently dropped the second survey from prominence or killed it entirely.
• * AND, as every viewer of the nationally televised Sunday Presidential forum is aware, Congressman Kucinich was not given an opportunity to answer a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos until 28 minutes into the program.

Stayed tuned for further details.

You can let ABC and ABC's This Week know how you feel by dropping them a line at thisweek@abc.com or politicalunit@abcnews.com

Bill Moyers Shames Corporate Media and Speaker Pelosi over Impeachment Sat, 2007-07-14 By Dave Lindorff
Bill Moyers has put impeachment in the news, in the process shaming both the national media and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Congressional leadership.

In his Saturday program, Bill Moyers Journal, Moyers and guests John Nichols, the Nation's Washington correspondent and author of The Genius of Impeachment and Bruce Fein, a former attorney in the Ronald Reagan Department of Justice, made it clear that the Bush/Cheney administration has gravely threatened the Constitution and the survival of tripartite, divided government...

It only took the Gray Lady FOUR YEARS to come to this conclusion, 'bout damn time! The tide may finally be turning...

The Road Home - New York Times Editorial Sunday 08 July 2007
It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that pResident Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq's government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs - after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush's plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost....

Things Your Media Mama Didn't Tell You by dlindorff on June 11, 2007
The fact that most Americans oppose the war in Iraq, and want the president impeached, is testimony to the native intelligence and common sense of the citizens of this nation.

It sure isn’t thanks to the quality of the news we’re getting here in America!

Here are ten things you don’t know if you just depend on the corporate media for your information:

1. Most Americans would like to see this president and vice president impeached and removed from office. Newsweek magazine published a scientific poll last October showing that 51 percent of us favor impeachment (including 29 percent of Republicans!), but the corporate media, which normally haven’t met a poll they won’t publish, didn’t publicize this one. And now, when the numbers supporting impeachment are surely even higher, you can’t even pay a polling outfit to ask the question. No wonder most people who favor impeachment still think they’re odd ducks...

Olbermann's Nexus of Politics and Terror
Part 1

Part 2 (below the fold)

Curious, very few news story's on this on Google News, only 37 published items out of the countless news outlets on the planet. And NOT ONE of them mentions the GOP "Caging List" emails revealed by Greg Palast that apparently prove criminal election fraud and vote suppression tactics by the Bushies....

Ex-aide to Rove resigns amid U.S. attorney flap June 1, 2007
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The former White House aide whose appointment to a U.S. attorney's post helped fuel the furor over the forced resignations of eight federal prosecutors will resign Friday, according to a news release.

Tim Griffin, 38, said in a Thursday statement that he is leaving his position as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas to pursue "opportunities" in the private sector...

Compiled via Wayne Madsen Reports...

May 25-27, 2007 -- The Justice Department filed a motion before US District Judge Gladys Kessler on May 23 to maintain the gag order against Washington Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey and her attorneys from releasing the names of any additional customers of Pamela Martin & Associates.

However, the motion by Assistant US Attorney William Cowden to keep the gag order in place was not filed until 11:54 PM Wednesday night, just six minutes before its expiration. In addition, the government's filing contained no affidavits supporting a continued gag order. The failure to provide affidavits weakened the government's case, according to court sources...

Action Alert 5/22/07
Illegal, Yes--But Not Newsworthy - Wiretapping testimony hardly covered
The revelations coming from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week were startling. On May 15, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey testified about the Bush administration's extraordinary efforts in March 2004 to gain legal approval for the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program by visiting Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital room as he recovered from gall bladder surgery. The story is surprising, at the very least—but has so far attracted little media curiosity....

Tucker: Active-Duty Generals Will ‘Revolt’ Against Bush If He Maintains Escalation Into 2008
Appearing on NBC’s Chris Matthews Show this morning, Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Cynthia Tucker revealed that sources within the military are warning of “a revolt from active-duty generals if September rolls around and the president is sticking with the surge into ‘08.” Watch it...

CBS fires consultant Gen. Batiste over VoteVets ad; 'We went to war with a fatally flawed strategy' Mike Sheehan Published: Friday May 11, 2007 - Retired Army Major Gen. John Batiste has been asked to leave his position as a consultant to CBS News over a new advertisement criticizing the Iraq war. The ad was produced by the group VoteVets...

NBC: 11 Republicans Berate Bush Over Iraq In Private White House Meeting - In a sign of the growing fissure between the White House and its congressional allies over the war, NBC News reports tonight that 11 Republican members of Congress pleaded yesterday with President Bush and his senior aides to change course in Iraq...