by Ethan Johnson
August 6, 2008

There are days I hover over the "unsubscribe" button for a blog called PressThink, as I'm not in the journo biz, and can probably read Romanesko if I really want to stay abreast of how many layoffs are happening domestically at the big newspaper outlets. Jay Rosen tends to be flogging his latest "citizen journalism" experiment, and I just don't have the calories for that stuff anymore. Have fun, I say, to those who do. But I keep the feed in my rotation because items like this one come along once in a while: Three Vital Questions for ABC News About its Anthrax Reporting in 2001

I have one vital question: Where has everybody been?

Rather than dredge up the links that bolster my case, I am going to go the "lonely old man" route and reminisce about the Anthrax Attacks that flared up (and flamed out) shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

When "9/11" happened, I had the visceral sense of "what's next?" It wasn't obvious who engineered and/or masterminded the attacks, all I knew was that they occurred, and that a) I'd never get to see/visit the World Trade Center, and b) they may have been a prelude to more mayhem and destruction. I was on edge all day, waiting for the next thing to fall out of the sky or explode at street level. The news media, for its part, went into Total Hysteria mode, and unfortunately a bridge was accidentally bumped by a tugboat (or similar) that wouldn't have made for international news on any other day. But the timing was awful, and I didn't blame the news outlets for shrieking "TERRORISM!!!" before learning the, you know, facts.

After the deep depression sank in that lives were lost and war would surely be waged on somebody, I had the feeling that 9/11 was a one-off, and not part of a multi-phase attack. But the anthrax letters starting making the rounds, which struck me as fishy. I didn't write much about them when they were happening, but "offline" I was following the developments to determine if this was indeed "phase two" or some opportunistic crap put forth by someone domestically. Considering the Bush Administration's war zeal, I had the sneaking feeling that this was a ham-handed attempt to play the terrorism card to usher in something more sinister than what we ended up living through. For example, an excuse to declare Condition Red and declare martial law, and canceling elections indefinitely since we can't have our war footing stymied by the electorate, can we? Needless to say, I cast aspersions on the anthrax letters and ruled out Iraq, Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, Iran, or Bin Laden. It seemed too pat.

As we now know, the attacks were domestic in nature, and to some extent governmental. But, as I learned at the time of the attacks, weaponized anthrax isn't exactly available over the counter at Walgreen's. If you're slinging that stuff around, it has something of a "signature" (as I understand) that can be traced back to its origin.

One day, some news outlet (don't have much concrete detail, sorry) noted that the anthrax used in the mailings was of domestic military origin. Wouldn't ya know it, the mailings ceased, and the case was essentially closed, what with Afghanistan and Iraq to worry about. But it always bugged me that whoever figured out that the anthrax wasn't part of some foreign terrorist plot didn't seem to follow this to its logical conclusion. Now, apparently that was happening out of public view, and only came to light now since the alleged perpetrator committed suicide. I'm inclined to shrug over the did he/didn't he question, since I consider it to be eminently plausible that the guy was being harassed into some sort of admission of guilt. Maybe he did it. Maybe not. To me, that question takes a back seat to the fact that the key distinction was made about this anthrax back when the scare was happening, and poof, it dropped out of the news cycle. Which apparently suited the purposes of those who wanted to make an Iraq or Al Qaeda connection.

I do blame "lazy" journalism for any claims of this sort that went unchallenged. The simple follow-up question would have been, "how did 'they' get 'our' anthrax?" Hem hem, cough.

Jay Rosen's roundup of the re-examination of the story mentions a false claim that "bentonite" was supposedly part of that distinctive anthrax signature, in an effort to make an Iraq connection. Speaking for myself, I have no recollection of this from that time. I just remember the blurb in passing that the anthrax was determined to be domestic in nature, and that squelched the story.

In the "after matter" section of Rosen's post about the Anthrax debacle, there is a fair amount of comment pong about what, if anything, would come of either "outing" whoever said that the anthrax was foreign in nature, or drilling down to determine what other lies and untruths were used (and dutifully passed along by lazy journalists) to make the case for war on Iraq. Speaking again for myself, I think the case has been made several times over that George W Bush et al should be impeached for war crimes, but that would involve a) strapping on a pair, b) growing a spine, and c) Congress doing its fucking job. Can't have that! Don't rock the boat!

I have long believed, even before Bush II, that if the people of these United States staged some sort of populist coup and overturned the existing government, and started making public all of that would-be "top super secret" stuff in the various file cabinets, it would be like layers of an onion*. I have every reason to believe that "national security" is a euphemism for "ignore the hands in the cookie jar." How badly do we want to know which hands are in what cookie jar? What would we do if we found out? Why wouldn't we buy whatever "spin" is offered up to explain away even red-handed malfeasance?

That this anthrax story is somehow "news" years later, when the punchline was delivered long ago and simply ignored, is significant, I suppose, in that someone bothered to (re-)report it, and the story got "legs". As someone said around the 2004 election, Bush II has several scandals to pick from, and the ones we know about are just the tip of the iceberg. I don't know what, if anything would be done to rectify the damage done in the new era ushered in by the next administration. Political successors don't seem to be into onion peeling. <EM>

* The deeper you go, the more it makes you cry.