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May 21, 2002
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
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The
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May
21, 2002
Riddle of the Spores
Why Has the FBI Investigation into
the Anthrax Attacks Stalled?
The Evidence Points One Way
by George Monbiot
The more a government emphasizes its commitment
to defense, the less it seems to care about the survival of its
people. Perhaps it is because its attention may be focused on
more distant prospects: the establishment and maintenance of
empire, for example, or the dynastic succession of its leaders.
Whatever the explanation for the neglect of their security may
be, the people of America have discovered that casual is the
precursor of casualty.
But while we should be asking what George
Bush and his cabinet knew and failed to respond to before September
11, we should also be exploring another, related, question: what
do they know now and yet still refuse to act upon? Another way
of asking the question is this: whatever happened to the anthrax
investigation?
After five letters containing anthrax
spores had been posted, in the autumn, to addresses in the United
States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation promised that it
would examine "every bit of information [and] every bit
of evidence". But now the investigation appears to have
stalled. Microbiologists in the US are beginning to wonder aloud
whether the FBI's problem is not that it knows too little, but
that it knows too much.
Reducing the number of suspects would
not, one might have imagined, have been too much to ask of the
biggest domestic detective agency on earth. While some of the
anthrax the terrorist sent was spoiled during delivery, one sample
appears to have come through intact. The letter received by Senator
Tom Daschle contained one trillion anthrax spores per gram: a
concentration which only a very few US government scientists,
using a secret and strictly controlled technique, know how to
achieve. It must, moreover, have been developed in a professional
laboratory, containing rare and sophisticated "weaponization"
equipment. There is only a tiny number of facilities--all of
them in the US--in which it could have been produced.
The anthrax the terrorist sent belongs
to the "Ames" strain of the bacterium, which was extracted
from an infected cow in Texas in 1981. In December, the Washington
Post reported that genetic tests showed that the variety used
by the terrorist was a sub-strain cultivated by scientists at
the US army's medical research institute for infectious diseases
(USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. That finding was publicly
confirmed two weeks ago, when the test results were published
in the journal Science. New Scientist magazine notes that the
anthrax the terrorist used appears to have emerged from Fort
Detrick only recently, as the researchers found that samples
which have been separated from each other for three years acquire
"substantial genetic differences".
The Ames strain was distributed by USAMRIID
to around 20 other laboratories in the US. Of these, according
to research conducted by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who runs the
Federation of American Scientists' biological weapons monitoring
program, only four possess the equipment and expertise required
for the weaponization of the anthrax sent to Senator Daschle.
Three of them are US military laboratories, the fourth is a government
contractor. While security in all these places has been lax,
the terrorist could not have stolen all the anthrax (around 10
grams) which found its way into the postal system. He must have
used the equipment to manufacture it.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has produced
a profile of the likely perpetrator. He is an American working
within the US biodefense industry, with a doctoral degree in
the relevant branch of microbiology. He is skilled and experienced
at handling the weapon without contaminating his surroundings.
He has full security clearance and access to classified information.
He is among the tiny number of Americans who had received anthrax
vaccinations before September 2001. Only a handful of people
fit this description. Rosenberg has told the internet magazine
Salon.com that three senior scientists have identified the same
man--a former USAMRIID scientist--as the likely suspect. She,
and they, have told the FBI, but it seems that all the bureau
has done in response is to denounce her.
Instead, it has launched the kind of
"investigation" which might have been appropriate for
the unwitnessed hit and run killing of a person with no known
enemies. Rather than homing in on the likely suspects, in other
words, it appears to have cast a net full of holes over the entire
population.
In January, three months after the first
anthrax attack and at least a month after it knew that the sub-strain
used by the attacker came from Fort Detrick, the FBI announced
a reward of $2.5m for information leading to his capture. It
circulated 500,000 fliers, and sent letters to all 40,000 members
of the American Society for Microbiology, asking them whether
they knew someone who might have done it.
Yet, while it trawled the empty waters,
the bureau failed to cast its hook into the only ponds in which
the perpetrator could have been lurking. In February, the Wall
Street Journal revealed that the FBI had yet to subpoena the
personnel records of the labs which had been working with the
Ames strain. Four months after the investigation began, in other
words, it had not bothered to find out who had been working in
the places from which the anthrax must have come. It was not
until March, after Barbara Hatch Rosenberg had released her findings,
that the bureau started asking laboratories for samples of their
anthrax and the records relating to them.
To date, it appears to have analyzed
only those specimens which already happened to be in the hands
of its researchers or which had been offered, without compulsion,
by laboratories. A fortnight ago, the New York Times reported
that "government experts investigating the anthrax strikes
are still at sea". The FBI claimed that the problem "is
a lack of advisers skilled in the subtleties of germ weapons".
Last week, I phoned the FBI. Why, I asked,
when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have
gone cold? "The investigation is continuing," the spokesman
replied. "Has it gone cold because it has led you to a government
office?" I asked. He put down the phone.
Had he stayed on the line, I would have
asked him about a few other offenses the FBI might wish to consider.
The army's development of weaponized anthrax, for example, directly
contravenes both the biological weapons convention and domestic
law. So does its plan to test live microbes in "aerosol
chambers" at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also
in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modified
fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria
for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces. These, as
the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to
be just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research
programs which the US government has secretly funded. Several
prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation
is being pursued with less than the rigor we might have expected
because the federal authorities have something to hide.
The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy
theorists. But there is surely a point after which incompetence
becomes an insufficient explanation for failure.
George Monbiot
is a columnist for the Guardian. Visit his website at: http://www.monbiot.com
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