So far, this course has dealt with the 9/11 attacks. Today, we widen our focus to the anthrax mailings that occurred shortly after 9/11/01. These, too, can be analyzed with both the official and the alternative version in mind. 

Under the official version of the war on terror, we are engaged in a struggle against a global terror network with access to chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear materials. According to this version, we might expect the anthrax spores to have been cultivated in a laboratory in a Muslim country in Asia - a country like Iraq, perhaps, which we invaded under the auspices of preventing such activities. Under the alternative version, we are immersed in a large-scale PSYOPS (psychological operations) program, conducted by insiders within our own government and military. Where would the spores have originated under this second scenario?

According to the Nov. 30, 2001 Washington Post (“Ames Strain of Anthrax Limited to a Few Labs”), the anthrax used in the mailings was developed at Texas A&M in 1981 and mailed to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Thereafter, USAMRIID was the “main custodian of the virulent strain of anthrax used in the…terrorist attacks” (www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36408-2001Nov29). Since the mid 1980s, USAMRIID had distributed it to only five laboratories, “under strict controls to ‘legitimate workers in the field.’” The source of the spores, therefore, is consistent with an Operation Northwoods-style attack on U.S. civilians by treasonous elements within the U.S. military.

Once the anthrax evidence pointed unequivocally to our own military, there followed a common pattern: Steven Hatfill, a U.S. Army bioweapons scientist, was paraded in the press for a while under a campaign of baseless innuendo. Like Osama bin-Laden, and like every one of the thousands of individuals arrested or detained under terrorist suspicions under John Ashcroft (see Mailing 10), Hatfill was convicted in the media, but never in court. The only legal proceeding to stem from the Hatfill affair, and in fact the only legal proceeding stemming from the anthrax attacks at all, was one in which Hatfill sued the government for violating his Constitutional rights (www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/08/26/lawsuit.hatfill/).

Why might military insiders feel compelled to mail anthrax after the 9/11 attacks had succeeded so well? There are at least two explanations consistent with the hypothesis that the anthrax mailings were an inside job. 

Explanation #1: Inserting terrorism into the U.S. postal service brought the “threat” home to every American who receives mail. It personalized the fear of terrorism.

Explanation #2: Only two politicians, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, were targeted by the anthrax mailings (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks). Both were prominent Congressional Democrats in a position to impede the passage of the Patriot Act and other unconstitutional maneuvers by the Bush administration. According to investigative journalist Michael Ruppert’s book "Crossing the Rubicon: the Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil", Senate minority leader Daschle had made it possible to temporarily block passage of the Patriot Act in early October 2001. Leahy was chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and had demanded an appearance from John Ashcroft before the committee to explain attempts to wiretap attorney-client conversations, to detain foreign nationals in secret, and to conduct secret military tribunals. 

With both the House and Senate Office Buildings closed down by the anthrax mailings, the Patriot act passed with Congress in recess, and without most Congressmen reading it. (Incidentally, the vast majority of the Patriot Act was written prior to 9/11.)

The anthrax attacks reinforce how media and political officials in our country, intentionally and/or not, simply refuse to address the obvious hypothesis that the real terrorists are homegrown, conducting their operations in plain sight.