Anthrax Update
By: Stephen CollierFollowing news of the suicide of a leading suspect in the anthrax attacks Glenn Greenwald has a piece at Salon about the unanswered questions related to the incidents. Most significant among these concerns a rumor about an Iraq connection to the attacks, propagated by ABC news, which, Greenwald points out, significantly affected the mood in the months up to the decision to go to war with Iraq. As he notes, the most curious question is why it is that the media has not been more curious about an apparently persistent attempt to point the investigation toward Iraq.
August 2nd, 2008 at 2:26 am
Thanks for this Stephen. The Salon article is refreshingly on the money about the strange catalyzing effect the anthrax attacks had on the nation’s collective psyche. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to agree, as the article implies, that 9/11 might have been viewed as a kind of horrific one-off event had anthrax not been released through the mail, I do believe dispersal of the pathogen substantially amplified concerns which had already begun circulating in the typical channels (Congress, hawk-ish Administration officials, think tanks, famous experts, top tier journals, pundits, etc.) for quite some time. Such concerns, which integrated generic terrorism (domestic or foreign/global: Oklahoma City, WTC, Tokyo subway) with easily made or released WMDs (the proverbial ’suitcase nuke’, or “even a high schooler could do it with basic lab equipment”) with systems vulnerability (”our first responders could not handle a mass catastrophic incident”, “public health is already overwhelmed) with inevitability (”it’s not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’), found a particularly resonant form in smallpox. The strange bit about all this is not that, in the end, one intentionally released infectious disease (anthrax) helped lead to a massive national effort against a completely different one (smallpox); rather, it is that (a) anthrax was situated in discourse as evidence of vulnerability to smallpox; (b) the attacks provided crucial material for a master narrative describing an omnipresent threat to citizen-individuals, specific populations, and a newly constituted ‘homeland’; and (c) the imperative to counter anthrax contributed to an essentially ethical discourse about the necessity and imperative of vaccination in service of community, the homeland and the larger (perennial) fight against terror and the unknown.
To close, one of the working theories regarding the anthrax attacks - almost certainly, I would hazard to guess, the lead theory once the spores were identified as originating at Fort Detrick - was that the perpetrator(s) carried out the attacks to raise awareness and attention to US vulnerability to bioterrorism, and (therefore) wished to catalyze political will, spur Congressional appropriations and put in motion strategies and the machinery for a massive, or massively revamped, biodefense effort. If the theory is correct, then the perpetrator accomplished much of what he set out to do. If this wasn’t a coup, I’m not sure what is. We’ll perhaps never know the truth about Dr. Ivins, but I think it’s a valid exercise to wonder whether he would have agreed with that.