Did the government exaggerate the concentration back then? Or are they downplaying the concentration now?

My guess is that they're downplaying and rewriting now.

Why bring up a five year old failed investigation now?

Even 5 years ago Bush was trying to blame the anthrax on Saddam Hussein and Iraq. It is almost October and you can tell it's an election year because DHinMI  and his hyenas are pretending to speak for feminism (I kid you not) on DK and the SYFPH diaries were blooming all over the 'liberal' blogs.
My guess is that they're going to try to sell an October suprise in which they 'prove' that Iraq was responsible for the anthrax mailings and did indeed have weapons of mass destruction.Insdeed, i would be willing to take bets on it.

All these exposures are happening and we're at the theater medical command headquarters. We're trying to get the information out. And you ask the question about control of the press and media. Flat-out, we had senior military officers who came from the Pentagon and tried to stop us from teaching, [and] tried to stop us from setting up medical care. And those are the same guys that released anthrax a few years ago on United States. The same guys. Because the only place the Ames strain of anthrax came from is U.S. Army lab at USAMRD. There's no place else that has in the world. And if you ever been up their working--and I have--you can't even get a fart out of the building.

-- Dr. Doug Rokke speaking on April 21, 2003 in Los Altos, CA, USA
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Rokke-Depleted-Uranium-DU21apr03.htm

Under ordinary circumstances, my instinct would be to say they were lying then about the danger, to get the Patriot Act passed.

But these aren't ordinary people or ordinary times.

I suspect we're being lied to now, to forestall any questions of why there's been no arrests in this case in 5 years.

But you're absolutely right, logically they had to be lying then or lying now.  If they were lying then, as you point out, they manufactured a lot of realistic-looking props in terms of consistent test results.

More likely they're lying now to hide the same.  Most of that data has probably vanished down the rabbit hole never to be seen again...

"Money ruined Democracy. Washington is lost. We only have the grassroots left." - Bill Moyers

I vote for hidden option 3, they were probably completely full of shit then and now.

That's the brutal part about this all, Republicans bloviate about how we're all going to die if Democrats are elected. This, of course, conveniently ignores that thousands have died directly as a result of Republican malfeasance.

I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own. ----- George Carlin

I have come to believe that the anthrax episode was manufactured somewhere very deep in the Bush government.  (I also think David Kelly was murdered, so this should authenticate my tin-foil hat).

No single episode -- because it was drawn out over several weeks -- had as much impact on American and Congressional public opinion as that anthrax scare.  It reinforced the initial shock of the attacks.  In terms of how it consolidated the Bush presidency, nothing dominates it.

So, please tell me what's wrong with this theory.  I would be more than pleased to be assured that it is wrong.  It's just that, in my present state of ignorance, there are so many reasons to think it might be right.

Thanks, Booman, for bringing this issue back up again.  It keeps getting pushed under the rug.

Knut

From a few comments at - believe it or not - free republic:

This article from the FBI scientist cites this reference as the authority for no additives:

http://cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/anthrax-powder.htm
Ironically this article gives multiple named government sources who state there WERE additives. It does also, however, give a statement attributed to FBI scientist Dwight Adams that he made at a private briefing to Daschle and Leahy where he said there were no additives.

Here's the twist. Dwight Adams was deposed under oath a couple of months ago in the Hatfill versus Ashcroft lawsuit.

He basically admitted that he witheld information from them at that meeting concerning the nature of the anthrax powder that was sent to them.

To re-iterate, it's important to understand what source Beecher used for his statement there were no addtives. Altimari writes:

"Individuals familiar with the compositions of the powders in the letters have indicated that they were [composed] simply of spores purified to different extents," Beecher wrote in his seven-page article in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Beecher interviewed FBI personnel assigned to the investigation as well as agents assigned to the FBI lab in Quantico, Va.

Thus implying he had inside FBI sources. In fact, what was written in the paper is this:

"Individuals familiar with the composition of the powers in the letters have indicated that they were were comprised simply of spores purified to different extents(6)."

References (6) BIOTERRORISM: Anthrax Powder: State of the Art? Gary MatsumotoScience 28 November 2003:Vol. 302. no. 5650, pp. 1492 - 1497

This is standard scientific paper protocol - it means this is where he obtained that information. If he had gotten that information from inside FBI sources he would have written in the references (6) Personal communication, John Doe, FBI labs.

Why Are We Back In Iraq?

When studying the cases of the past, it was a regular pattern. The earliest stories would often prove true, and everything that came later was part of the cover-up.

I'd believe those early stories. No one knew then that they needed to lie.

In addition, I did a timeline for someone of events following 9/11, and found a real scandal that's never been discussed in depth (except, perhaps, in fictional form in V for Vendetta). In the wake of the Anthrax scare, Cipro sales went through the roof. Cipro is the brand name for one of the drugs that serves as an effective antibiotic to Anthrax.

Now in Canada, seeing they were in short supply, and seeing how the company would not or could not keep up with enough production to meet the foreseen demand, the government seized the patents and handed them to generic companies and got all the Cipro they needed. Cipro is made by Bayer. Bayer was being very unreasonable. The Canadians took matters into their own hands. The American government, on the other hand, just shelled out lots of money to Bayer, never mind the public concern.

I've often wondered who the major shareholders at the time were, and if they included Cheney, Rumsfeld, or other familiar names. Remember when the Avian Flu scare was at its height, we learned that Rumsfeld owned shares in the company Gilead that made the remedy medicine Tamiflu.(See http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20ME20051026&articleId=1148 .)

The reason for coverup stories like this is that every news article goes into massive databases - Nexus and others. If only the truth can be found, that's disaster for conspirators. So they muddy the waters, and get these other stories. Now there's "reasonable doubt" or better yet, persuasive disinformation that people can point to and say hey, what are those conspiracy theorists talking about? It says right here in the paper that the anthrax was NOT weapons grade.

Like I said, it's a VERY familiar pattern. Check out the 11/23 article in the New York Times on the Kennedy assassination, and you'll find that one bullet entered the back but never exited, and was presumed to have been lost in Kennedy's chest. There's massive support for the fact that the bullet did not exit, and how this worried the doctors, in the medical records compiled by the House Select Committee on Assassinations. I clipped them and posted them on my Real History Archives site. There never was a chance that a single bullet killed Kennedy and wounded Connally. But that didn't stop the lies from being propagated. (See http://www.realhistoryarchives.com/collections/assassinations/jfk/icebulls.htm .)

"If you look for the social economic motive, you will not have to wait for history to tell you what was propaganda and what was truth." - George Seldes

Not usually part of the tin-foil hat crowd but in this case have been suspicious from the outset about the anthrax attacks. When one looks at who was most likely to profit from the attacks, it was clearly the administration. The attacks helped to gin up fear in the populace and, as noted above, ram through the Patriot Act. In case anyone forgets, there were also aggressive administration efforts to tie the attacks to Iraq, thus preemptively justifying a preemptive attack on that country. The careful selection of targets is also suggestive. The toxic mail was sent to media outlets (newspapers and TV), assuring rapid and widespread distribution of the story; and to US Senators (Democratic), assuring their compliance in pushing through desired administration legislation. Interesting that while the attacks had maximal fear-inducing impact at the time, morbidity and mortality were, relatively speaking, quite limited. This was a well-planned and sophisticated operation. Could rogue scientists have pulled this off and why would they?

Also important to note that, prior to 911, the Army was producing weaponized anthrax, acknowledged by Rumsfeld, and possibly in violation of international treaties (perhaps the reason it didn't get much play in American news). The Army and CIA were quick to deny the anthrax came from their stocks but note that, because the DNA analysis clearly pointed to the US Ames strain and they couldn't support a denial on that basis, they said they only had the liquid form.

"You can't say it all came from USAMRIID."
Scientists at Fort Detrick use the liquid strain of anthrax in research, Mr Dasey said.
"The point is we don't have the technology to make that fine dry powder which was in the letters."

Richard O. Spertzel, a biological warfare expert and a member of the Iraq Survey Group was clear about the sophistication needed to successfully implement such an attack:

"In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make this stuff, and I'm one of them." "And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good."    
"I do not believe science will identify the laboratory or country from which the present anthrax spores are derived. The quality of the product contained in the letter to Senator Daschle was better than that found in the Soviet, U.S. or Iraqi program, certainly in terms of the purity and concentration of spore particles."
"I have maintained from the first descriptions of the material contained in the Daschle letter that the quality appeared to be such that it could be produced only by some group that was involved with a current or former state program in recent years. The level of knowledge, expertise, and experience required and the types of special equipment required to make such quality product takes time and experimentation to develop. Further, the nature of the finished dried product is such that safety equipment and facilities must be used to protect the individuals involved and to shield their clandestine activity from discovery."

Having vanished from the radar, why is this story appearing now? Well, one possibility is that the anthrax culprit (like Osama) hasn't been found -another Bush failure -  and there is precious little evidence that either has been pursued aggressively of late. This story whitewashes the administration's lack of seriousness in tracking down known terrorists. It also reminds people to "be afraid" when going to the polls. Let's just hope they're not ramping up to an October anthrax surprise.
As pointed out by Ron the source cited in the WaPo piece is not original. A good example of the administration feeding faux news to gullible, lazy journalists.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts - Bertrand Russell

Great post.

There was another significant quote in the post article (emphasis added):

As a result, after a very public focus on government scientists as the likely source of the attacks, the FBI is today casting a far wider net, as investigators face the daunting prospect of an almost endless list of possible suspects in scores of countries around the globe.

The anthrax attacks played a significant part in the buildup to the Iraq war, as many people found anthrax a far more credible threat than the cobbled-together nuclear stuff. It worked so well last time, I think it's pretty clear what's happening now. Expect to see articles about Iran's bioweapons (after all, they did use chemical weapons in self-defense in the iran-Iraq war). And that's just the beginning.

Serene in his faith, speaking in code to the religious right, Bush sails on, across a sea of commas. Forget about an "October Surprise." Prepare for a "November Surprise" instead -- one coming after the election. That looks to be Bush's best chance to try to clean up Iraq once and for all by going after Iran and bringing "real democracy" to the Middle East at last, before any meddling new Congress can stop him. Bush knows everything will be fine. He's working his way through the commas and approaching the end of the sentence. He's the democracy-bringer, and he's doing God's will.

Hey booman, where are you, looks like you need to ban this ip address or block this member...

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