You sure you wouldn't be bitching about something else?

I hope not. No, really. I wonder sometimes. Nothing less wonderful than a whiner in Oakland.

Glenn Greenwald, who writes for Salon.com, posted a disturbing entry this morning. The news has been reporting the suicide of Bruce E. Ivins, a scientist at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Maryland and that the Department of Justice had been about to indict him for the anthrax through the mail attacks that occurred just after 9/11. There seems to be some certainty now that these anthrax attacks came from within the United States, probably by an individual or individuals working for one of our weapons labs, and had nothing to do with outside “terrorist” sources.

What's interesting is these anthrax attacks were used at the time as one of the primary justifications for the invasion of Iraq, ABC News in particular reporting they had “four well-placed and separate sources” saying the anthrax had been analyzed at the Ft. Detrick facility (where Ivins worked) and found to contain the chemical additive Bentonite. Bentonite was generally reported to be an additive used exclusively by Iraq in the production of their chemical weapons.

This “Bentonite connection” was one of the justifications used by the administration to sell the invasion of Iraq to the Congress and the American people. The one problem is that it was later confirmed there was never any Bentonite found in any of the analyses conducted on any of the samples that were found.

This implies at least four people put together a political “dirty trick” by leaking information they knew to be false stating the anthrax attack was connected to Iraq through the presence of Bentonite, a connection they invented to sell a war that has led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

There are other odd twists to the story - journalists who have reported they were warned by “senior administration sources” of possible anthrax attacks prior to the attacks themselves and took these warnings seriously enough to go out and obtain the anthrax antidote Cipro - but if all of the government tests were negative on Bentonite, who were these four sources who fed this misinformation to ABC News?

If this was a dirty trick using an invented lie to lead us to war then there are four “sources” who need to be questioned about their statements. Not that they had any part in the anthrax attack itself, but did they use the attack to create a fiction that helped them lead us to war? I wonder about ABC News and their reaction to the fact they were set up and used by “four well-placed and separate sources” to lead us to war.

If you don't out them as sources - and I'm not yet clear in my own mind on their obligation, if they have one, of shielding them as sources - don't you at least put a team on the story and see what more might be found? Look for a little pay back? I don't think you want to live happily in a world where people set your news organization up, enlist you in the promotion of an indefensible war, and let that happen without consequences. I don't think. Unless they've got you totally by the balls.

Settle down.

Later. Two Netflix arrivals today, one half way interesting, one something of a dud. The way it goes.