The man accused of the 2001 anthrax attacks has died of an apparent suicide. Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon, lays out a compelling case that ABC News misled the public into thinking Saddam Hussein's Iraq was behind the attacks.
This is less a proper diary than a plea that you read the Greenwald piece and write to ABC News asking them to reveal the source of their 2001 disinformation.
More over the flip.
Greenwald makes a persuasive case that the 2001 anthrax attacks, coming in the week after 9/11, ratcheted up the level of fear and marked a turning point in the public perception of Iraq as a menace.
The link between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein came when ABC News reported that laboratory tests at Ft. Detrick (where the now deceased suspect Bruce Ivins was employed as an anthrax scientist) revealed the presence of traces of bentonite in the anthrax letters, believed to be a hallmark of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programs.
The problem is, no tests ever suggested the presence of bentonite. ABC News attributed this misinformation to "four well-placed and separate sources". The question that we should be asking ABC News is who were the well-placed sources feeding ABC News false information linking Saddam Hussein to the anthrax attacks?
Again, please see the Greenwald piece in Salon, it's much better than anything I could write.
But please also contact ABC News to ask that they identify the sources of the false bentonite information (they shouldn't be obligated to protect sources that feed them lies!)