Six Questions About the Anthrax Attacks That the Public Should Demand

(Compiler's note: The questions and the discussion prove to a long but most interesting read. rca)

By Tom Engelhardt

The media's already losing interest on the anthrax story, but there are plenty of simple questions that really deserve answers. ....

....Here are my top six questions about the case:

1. Why wasn't the Bush administration's War on Terror modus operandi applied to the anthrax case?....

2. Why wasn't the U.S. military sent in?....

3. Once the anthrax threat was identified as coming from U.S. military labs, why did the administration, the FBI, and the media assume that only a single individual was responsible?....

4. What of those military labs? Why does their history continue to play little or no part in the story of the anthrax attacks?....

5. Were the anthrax attacks the less important ones of 2001? ....

6. Who is winning the Global War on Terror?....

.... The media's already losing interest on the anthrax story, but there are plenty of simple questions that really deserve answers.

More recently, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com has done superb work on the anthrax story. In 2007, he wrote a striking column, "The unresolved story of ABC News' false Saddam-anthrax reports," on some crucially bad reporting by Brian Ross and ABC, and he followed up after Ivins's suicide with a piece, ("Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation,") that has more unsettling questions about the anthrax case than any other 16 pieces I've seen. It's a must read. Jay Rosen, at his always interesting PressThink blog, took up Greenwald's challenge to Brian Ross and ABC on its reporting and pressed the point home in two recent posts, here and here.

Finally, Elisa D. Harris, a senior research scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, had a fine, thoughtful op-ed last week in the New York Times, "The Killers in the Lab" ("Our efforts to fight biological weapons are making us less safe"), which laid out in an impressive way the expansion of U.S. bio-weapons research since 2001.]