The Forgotten Anthrax Attacks of 2001

[G_j]

from:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/

Tomgram: The Forgotten Anthrax Attacks of 2001

(Note: This is the second of two pieces focused on reevaluating the costs of the September 11 attacks. In the first, Shark-bit World, I took the New York Times back to the week before September 11, 2001, time-machine style, and found a forgotten world in which the Bush administration, with its poll numbers dropping and congressional Republicans fretting, was drifting, politically challenged, and besieged -- a moment not unlike our own. I concluded: "Four long years to make it back to September 10th, 2001 in an American world now filled to the brim with horrors, a United States which is no longer a ‘country,' but a ‘homeland' and a Homeland Security State." Tom)

~ ~ ~
It Should Have Been Unforgettable
The Anthrax Attacks and the Costs of 9/11
By Tom Engelhardt

Imagine, for a moment, that someone had a finger on a pause button just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. That's not such a crazy thought. After all, most Americans watched the attacks and their aftermath on television; and, as coups de théâtre, they were clearly meant to be viewed on screen. Of course, the technology for pausing reality didn't quite exist then. But if someone in that pre-TiVo age had somehow hit pause soon after the Twin Towers came down, while the Pentagon was still smoking, when Air Force One was carrying a panicky George Bush in the wrong direction rather than towards Washington and New York to become the resolute war president of his dreams, if someone had paused everything and given us all a chance to catch our breath, what might we have noticed about the actual damage to our world?

As a start, there were those two towers and so many of the people in them (and those who came to rescue them) tumbling in that near-mushroom cloud of smoke into one of the greatest piles of instant rubble and powder in history. Even a few days later, glimpsed down various side streets, the vision of destruction at the World Trade Center site -- those gigantic, jagged shards of left-over building -- were (I can attest) more than worthy of some civilization-ending sci-fi film; of, say, the final scene in the original Planet of the Apes where the top of the off-kilter Statue of Liberty looms from the sand. So, other than the loss of lives, the initial cost of 9/11 was two large buildings and, in Washington, part of a third -- clearly stand-ins for American financial and military power. (The fourth hijacked plane, which went down in Pennsylvania, was surely on its way to the capital to add political power to the ensemble, creating the sort of triad that human beings seem eternally attracted to.)

Add four expensive planes (and their passengers and crews) to the list. Add as well, the economic impact of the downtown of a great city left in chaos; of the Stock Exchange halted; of destroyed businesses and lost business; then include the whack the travel and tourism industry took; and that's undoubtedly not a full list. None of this -- the lives lost most of all -- was in any way minor. We were hurt, that's for sure, though the economic impact of 9/11 would turn out to be closer to hiccup than earthquake.

But there were other costs, so much harder to tabulate. After all, Americans were not just hurt, but hurting. We had been robbed of something that seemed quite real (if you didn't happen to live in the vicinity of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City), something missing from the lives of so many others on this planet -- a sense of living in a safe and secure world. And the thieves had a Hollywood-inspired sense of spectacle; they were scenario producers who, with finances hardly suitable for a film noir, created the look of a large-budget extravaganza (of a sort Americans had long been familiar with in which towering infernos blazed, atom bombs went off, and volcanoes erupted in urban downtowns). They managed to mix "conventional" weaponry -- airplanes (that is, combustible fuel), box cutters, and mace -- into a brew that, whether by plan or simply luck, had the apocalyptic look of a weapon of mass destruction. Because the damage at the Pentagon didn't have that look, it never quite qualified for full membership in the 9/11 experience. On the other hand, the spot where the Twin Towers collapsed was instantly and universally dubbed "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for the place where an atomic test or, in the case of two Japanese cities, atomic bombs went off.

..more..

[TheDebbieDee]

1. I hadn't forgotten about the Anthrax mailgrams.........

Those mailgrams were used to terrorize the newsanchors of the big three broadcast networks as well as the minority leaders of the House and Senate.

That's why there were very few questions asked in the run-up to the Iraqi Invasion. The Anthrax threats were the reason why * admin has had very little in the way of opposition up til this point.

And in the past 3 or 4 years, when the nation asks "Why didn't Peter Jennings tell us this?" or "Why doesn't Harry Reid do something about this?", I already know the answer.

This administration is only a few steps away from being able to make the political opposition (That's Democrats!) disappear (a la Padilla) for months at a time by branding them as traitors and having them shipped off out of the country to "questioned".

The Dems have been very brave to stop rolling over for the repub run House and Senate.

[CJCRANE]

2. Anthrax attack was almost more scary than 9-11

because everyone gets letters (whereas relatively few people work in landmark buildings).

Also, without the anthrax attacks, the hysteria caused by 9-11 would've subsided a lot sooner.

[Solomon]

3. And now they are trying to lie about it through fictional television shows

such as "Sleeper Cell" on Showtime which plots say the muslim-arab terrorists smuggled anthrax into america.

There's only like 6 people period in america that have access to anthrax but they can't find out where it came from?

[IChing]

4. This was taken care of by the Ministry of Truth and dropped down

the memory hole. It did what it was suppose to do and that was
to frighten the Masses to support loses of liberty and freedom
and contribute to mass mania of 9-11.

The anthrax attack was a inside job,
prove me wrong non tinfoil people.
Prove me wrong.

The type of anthrax used was from a government agency
and the majority of the targets were democrats and media heads.

The deaths of the people that died were inconsequential in their minds
to the outcome it achieved.....It scared everyone at that time.

[Al-CIAda]

6. This is what they refuse to aknowledge,

The 'attacks' were a planned, co-ordinated, and implimented just as some Dems and media began to question the 9/11 'failure'.


...but nooooo, Alqueda and Bu$hco/PNAC aren't working together, not at all.

[G_j]

5. ""cold case, dead file" written all over it. "

a couple more snippets, btw this piece has enough connected links to keep one busy for a few days.

<snip>
Within the last year, the ongoing investigation of the case has, according to the Washington Post, been significantly downsized. The number of FBI agents assigned to it has dropped from 31 to 21 and postal inspectors from 13 to 9. Many of those remaining are now said to be "in the process of taking inventory. The FBI and postal inspectors have spent months piecing together a voluminous internal report that will review the scope of the investigation…" It has "cold case, dead file" written all over it.

<snip>
When was the last time you read a major report on the state of American biowarfare work? When was the last time you encountered a significant story about the weapons labs at Fort Dietrich in suburban Maryland where the Ames strain was evidently first researched or the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah where it was produced and tested? How much attention has been given to recent contracts linked to Dugway that signal a desire on the part of the U.S. military to "buy large quantities of anthrax, in a controversial move that is likely to raise questions over its commitment to treaties designed to limit the spread of biological weapons"? When was the last time you read an article on whether the Homeland Security Department or the Pentagon is attending to the potential dangers of the American WMD arsenal? How much attention has gone into the decrepit system for locking down Russian WMD stocks? The odd news piece, nothing more. And while this administration spends about a billion dollars a week on its war in Iraq, it has hardly had the will or interest to raise the few billion dollars a year needed to help lock-down the Russian arsenal. Imagine that. If, of course, the President had chosen to launch his "war" on terror against the anthrax killers, this might have been our top priority.

<snip>