Four well-placed and separate sources told ABCNEWS that initial tests detected bentonite, though the White House initially said the chemical was not found.
The first battery of tests, conducted at Ft. Detrick, Md., and elsewhere, discovered the anthrax spores were treated with the substance, which keeps the tiny particles floating in the air by preventing them from sticking together making it more likely that they could be inhaled.
The inhaled form on anthrax is far more deadly than the skin form.
As far as is known, only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons, but officials caution that the presence of the chemical alone does not constitute firm evidence of Iraqi involvement.
[…]
The official said the Ft. Detrick findings represented an "opinionated analysis," that three other labs are conducting tests, and that one of those labs had contradicted the bentonite finding. But, the official added, "tests continue."
—ABC News, October 29, 2001.
Intriguingly, the Headline for the above story on the ABC News website reads, "Troubling Anthrax Additive Found; Atta Met Iraqi," with the sub-head, "Tests find laced anthrax, Atta met Iraqi."
Everyone now knows the ballocks in the repeated claim that Atta met Iraqi. There's no further room for argument on that. Atta did not meet Iraqi, though it was convenient to say so for many highly placed [cough Vice President] administration officials talking on and off the record in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Even when confronted with contradictory evidence, the Vice President repeated the claim publicly again and again.
Privately he and his minions provided unsourced comments linking Atta with the anthrax based on the suspect report from Fort Detrick claiming to have found a uniquely Iraqi chemical signature on the anthrax used in those shocking terrorist mailings that began one week after 9/11.
The meeting, along with Iraq's stockpiles of biological weapons, have led some to question whether Atta and Hussein were not somehow behind the anthrax attacks in the United States.
Yep. A suggested connection sourced to "some" between "the meeting" [no qualifier there, no "purported," no "hypothetical," no "unsubstantiated" -p.r.] in Prague connecting Al Qaeda with Iraq, and the anthrax attacks as a second wave of terror from the same source. The same "some" who peddled the Atta met Iraqi balderdash were promoting the "opinionated analysis" from Ft. Detrick with all the CSI-like sciencey stuff in it to show that Iraqis had to have made the anthrax. That too was false, though equally convenient.
Fort Detrick is the home of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Bruce E. Ivins worked, Bruce E. Ivins who couldn't account for his lab being contaminated with anthrax numerous times over a five month period beginning in late 2001 and ending in April 2002, but also where the FBI sent one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes to be investigated. Was it Ivins whose analysis of this envelope so clearly and conveniently for the Vice President's purposes pointed to the Iraqis? Yes. Yes, it was his work.
Bruce E. Ivins is said to have committed suicide Tuesday, ingesting a whole bunch of Tylenol with codeine just as Federal authorities got around to informing him that they were finally ready to press charges against him after all these years.
No comments:
Post a Comment