Anthrax is back

No, there hasn't been another attack.

But with the suicide of Bruce Ivins, the FBI's top suspect in the unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks, anthrax is back in the news.

I had pretty much forgotten about these events, and when I did think about them, I considered them a fairly minor footnote to the 9/11 attacks.

But I just read Glenn Greenwald's Salon.com article in which he highlights the central role the anthrax attacks had in heightening the sense of crisis in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 2001. The letters that accompanied the anthrax themselves suggested a link to Islamic extremists.

And more: ABC News strongly played up a link between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein, citing unnamed sources and making the claim that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax letters pointed at Iraq as the source. Problem was that there was never any bentonite in the anthrax that was used in the attacks. Greenwald raises the possibility that ABC's sources were at Fort Detrick, the government lab responsible for biowar defense and research.

Fort Detrick just happens to also be the lab that Bruce Ivins worked at, suggesting that the person who sent the letters and the person who provided ABC with the inaccurate tip linking the letters to Iraq might be one and the same. ABC has refused to divulge their sources.

What did the government know and when? Disturbingly, John McCain suggested a link between the anthrax attacks and Iraq several days before ABC News went public with their information.

There is a lot to be concerned about in this story. Without the fear that the anthrax attacks evoked and the subsequent false connection to Iraq that ABC hyped, Congress, let alone the public, might never have gone along with George W. Bush's desire to take down Saddam.

ABC News needs to share with the public what they know about these events.

UPDATE

More from the New York Times, which notes that the original FBI investigation after the anthrax attacks was executed somewhat ineptly. And this:

While genetic analysis had linked the anthrax letters to a supply of the deadly bacterium in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., at least 10 people had access to the flask containing that anthrax, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.

Andrew Sullivan comments here and here.