Terrorism

A New York Daily News headline following the September 2001 anthrax attacksBruce Edwards Ivins, a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories, died of an apparent suicide last Tuesday, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the September 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people in the United States. Glenn Greenwald has written an important piece for Salon.com in which he demonstrates, with copious evidence, that a major government scandal lurks behind the anthrax story.

Ivins may have acted alone in carrying out the anthrax attacks. (I don't want to presume his guilt or anything else about this case until we see further details about the government's evidence against him.) However, Ivins most certainly did not act alone in falsifying information so the attacks could be used as a pretext for war.

"If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks," Greenwald writes, "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."