Trump's Quack COVID Advisor Steven Hatfill Brings a Flashback to the Bizarre Anthrax Attacks

Some recent reporting revealed that Steven Hatfill, worked on the COVID response under Trump, where he seems to have made things worse. 

Anyway, this old post from me here quotes a long DU post about the anthrax attacks, which has a bunch of astounding info that I'd completely forgotten about.

Then there is the October 2001 anthrax attacks -- a clear smoking gun for government-sponsored terror if there ever was one: 

The anthrax attacks of October 2001 should have put an end to doubts about the "War on Terror" and the likelihood that elements of the U.S. government are willing to stage inside-job terror attacks on American soil. Instead the attacks have been forgotten, although at the time they were trumped up into something even bigger than 9/11.

Unlike the case of 9/11, the facts about the anthrax attacks are simple, clear and close to conclusive:

-The Bush government revived an anthrax program early in 2001 on orders from Cheney and had developed a new milling process just before Sept. 11. Incredibly, this was called "Project Jefferson" (!).

- A week before Sept. 11, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon was experimenting in the "defensive" development of anthrax milling methods. Government scientists were assigned to put together home-made laboratories, using only materials available commercially, on the sparse budget of a mere one million of your taxpayer dollars. When this was revealed, the Pentagon said they weren't actually taking the final step, of milling live spores (although I wonder why, once ready, they would not want to see how well their lab works). The idea of the exercise, supposedly, was to see what terrorists might whip together from store-bought items. The French got wind of this program and complained to a United Nations committee, since the biowarfare convention outlaws all research, including "defensive research." To allay these concerns, the Pentagon invited an NY Times reporter, our old friend Judy Miller, to the Texas base where the experiments were held.*

-On Sept. 11th the White House immediately put some of its staff, reportedly including Cheney himself, on Cipro. How did they know to pick this antibiotic, out of the many available? How could they guess that anthrax (or another pathogen against which Cipro can protect) was coming? This is the subject of a discovery suit by Judicial Watch: how did they know?**

-A wave of stories immediately after Sept. 11th announced that anthrax was the likeliest next attack. We were even threatened with a specific sequence of future attacks: anthrax, smallpox, plague. (They've been drumming up the smallpox scare ever since the anthrax attacks stopped.) Of all the hundreds of biowar germs and literally thousands of types of terror attacks, why was this idea circulated so prominently? Who was behind spreading these stories? Why so specific?

-Suspect Hatfill, while working biowarfare research at SAIC/Batelle Memorial in 1999, commissioned his colleague in science, William Capers Patrick, the renowned dean of American biowarfare research, to write a report on modalities that terrorists might employ in sending anthrax through the mail.

-The report from that study specified an ideal spore concentration and weight of anthrax sample per envelope. These were the amounts that were then reportedly used in the attacks on Daschle and Leahy. In other words, the anthrax attackers had access to this secret report.

-The anthrax went first to the headquarters of the country's biggest tabloid owner (National Enquirer and Florida Sun-Sentinel). The Enquirer had printed a series of anti-Bush "conspiracy" stories, including one claiming that McVeigh was still breathing after his execution. The Enquirer also published embarrassing pictures of the Bush twins drunk, which had gotten much play on Drudge and similar outlets. Was this an object lesson to the media? (Note: never established how it got to Bob Stevens; no envelope located; theory that it may have been spread from one floor to another by a vacuum cleaner .. or was he directly hit, via keyboard?)

-The wife of the paper's editor had rented an apartment to Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi. Was the paper going to do a story about this that would not have fit the official 9/11 line?

--At this point, the FBI on a request from Iowa State University allowed the destruction of a stockpile of original Ames strain samples on Oct. 13, days after the Bob Stevens case became known. Why?! This was a precaution?!

-The next group of attacks hit the New York media. The letters arrived just as the Afghanistan campaign began and caused maximum coverage of nothing but anthrax. For a vital week or two, both the Afghanistan campaign and the 9/11 investigation became secondary concerns to the media.

-At that point the FBI immediately called off one-half of the thousands of agents who were working on 9/11 and put them to work on anthrax. THIS IS VITAL: THE 9/11 INVESTIGATION WAS STALLED BECAUSE OF THE SUDDEN ANTHRAX MAILINGS.

-The third wave of attacks, the one that exactly fit the specifications of the secret paper commissioned by Hatfill, was sent first to Daschle and Leahy - the majority leader of the Democratic opposition in the Senate, and the Democratic head of the Judiciary Committee.

-The government said the anthrax powder sent to Daschle and Leahy had been put through a much more sophisticated process of milling to aerosolize the spoors, such as would require advanced technology from a state weapons program.

-This exceptional piece of constituent mail arrived at Daschle offices about a week after the USA PATRIOT Act was submitted to the Congress. Leahy supposedly received his weeks later on Nov. 17, due to it being lost in the mail. Leahy had initially opposed the Act, and requested clarification of its more extreme provisions from Ashcroft. Ashcroft never answered.

- Senate offices were shut down and Capitol Hill went into an uproar. For weeks, as employees lined up for doses of antibiotics, Hazmat and FBI agents poked around in the Senate.

- By the end of that month the Republican-majority House chose to run home. As they left, they cast their votes for the USA PATRIOT Act and its negation of the U.S. Constitution. As Republican Congressman Ron Paul has made clear, most of them did not even receive a text of the 300-page final version of the USA PATRIOT Act before they voted for it, let alone read it.

- The Senate soon followed suit, also approving USA PATRIOT.

- Reports told that Sens. Kennedy and Levin, two other liberals, had also received anthrax letters, although no photos of these letters were published.

- The notes included with the anthrax letters to Daschle, Leahy and Tom Brokaw tried to point the blame at Arab perpetrators, but these were clumsy and transparent. ("Allah is Great" instead of "God Is Great" or "Allah Akhbar.") They are written in block letters and look as though someone got a child to write them or wrote them with a pen in his left fist (assuming he's right-handed).

- The news at first wanted to blame it on Arabs, or Iraq. Why should that damned Osama bin Laden hate the Democratic leadership, as opposed to Republican leaders?

- Only days later did reports arrive of anthrax being found in mail to the White House, Pentagon, Federal Reserve, CIA, etc. All of their mail had by then been very safely isolated on military bases. No details about these alleged attacks have been released. We have not seen copies of the letters, as was the case with the letters to Daschle, Leahy and Tom Brokaw. There have to my knowledge been no follow-up reports on the provenance of the anthrax employed in these cases.

How strange how the first attacks, the only ones that had a chance to get through, went to the Democratic leadership!

- Suddenly, the anthrax wave stopped as quickly as it had begun. The biggest U.S. media story of October 2001 was effectively swept away. The media obediently switched to the taking of Kabul and spent November 2001 preparing us for a thoughtful Thanksgiving, with endless soul-searching stories asking how our country could have ever produced Johnny Taliban Walker.

- Anthrax has since been mentioned only rarely and out of context, as when Powell had the gall to hold up a vial of white powder at the UN and ask where Saddam is hiding his anthrax. Well, Colin, where are you keeping yours?

-All the foreign anthrax letters reported at various times in 2001 have been dismissed as white-powder hoaxes.

-It was established quickly that the anthrax to Leahy and Daschle was of recent production, with high-quality, weaponized spores such as can be produced only by a specialist at an advanced facility; and that the lineage goes back to Fort Detrick, Maryland and the Ames strain used by American biowarfare programs.

-For all this, the anthrax perpetrator(s) made an obvious effort to minimize casualties and target the letters very specifically to individuals. The same amount of anthrax could have been spread in a fashion causing many more deaths.

-Having gotten as far as Stephen Hatfill, the FBI investigation stalled. Hatfill has been a "person of interest" for more than two years, his house has been invaded several times by sniffer-dog teams, and the FBI even drained a pond near his house to see if he had grown anthrax spores in it; but no further progress has been reported in the investigation.

- Could it be that the "lone perpetrator" thesis is not sustainable, and they don't want to deal with the implications?

What can we conclude?

Unlike Sept. 11th, the anthrax attacks were a selective wave of terror. The confirmed letters, the ones that resulted in the deaths of six people, were targeted at specific individuals: reporters, news media personalities, and four leading Democratic senators. This was by design, there was nothing random about it. The perpetrators have not been presented and so we can only speculate about their motives, but there is no doubt about the direct and predictable effect of their design: the attacks were perfectly sequenced and timed to cow the opposition, force through the Patriot Act, make an exampe of deviant journalists, divert the 9/11 investigation, and frighten and occupy the media during the first phase of the Afghanistan war. The attacks provided important reinforcement in keeping these various actors from questioning the official post-Sept. 11th atmosphere of terror and panic. They were the key step in initiating the formal transformation of American society and law.

In simpler words, the anthrax attacks look exactly as though they were planned and executed by a black-ops or damage-control team working on behalf of the Bush regime's goals, either as rogues or as appointed hitmen. They may have hit Bob Stevens as a revenge job, they hit the media to shut them up, and they hit Daschle and Leahy to intimidate them into accepting the USA PATRIOT Act. We might compare the crew who were responsible for this to Nixon's Plumbers, except that they were more sophisticated and effective in their choice of methods; or, perhaps, they simply had better protection among their sponsors.

That is the hypothesis so far that best covers all of the above facts. In this case, there is no doubt which way Occam's razor cuts. Anthrax was almost certainly an inside job.

In fact, this is the thesis that many people subscribe to when speaking off the record in the the world capital of paranoia itself, Washington, DC.

And what has Daschle done or said about these facts? Are Brokaw and Rather really unaware of all this? They have chosen not to defend themselves against what are, in effect, attempts on their own lives.

This is the context in which we should view the Jan. 2002 call from Cheney, the premature Cipro-taker, to Daschle, the anthrax recipient. Cheney threatened Daschle of dire consequences if he should push too hard for a 9/11 investigation in the Congress. This single call led to a series delays in the Congressional joint inquiry of Sept. 11, which finally opened in June 2002.

Daschle - and Leahy, and all the other Senators including Kerry and Edwards - are so scared, or so compromised, or otherwise being blackmailed with other threats, that they have not risen to this challenge. I don't envy or accuse them, but how can you expect these guys to ever confront the Bush mob?

(*NOTE: What justification is there for programs like "Jefferson"? This program not only finds out what terrorists might do, it no doubt discovers ways to do it that they might not have thought of themselves. The government scientists gain the astonishing insight that there's fuck-all they can do to stop evil biology students from engaging in such activities if they so wish. And the program's results will be written up in a little "defensive" manual on how to make your own anthrax lab. One day, probably soon, that will end up in the hands of one of our freedom fighters somewhere... and a years down the line he or his successor will use it against the U.S., thus setting off the next round of "defensive" activity on our part. At least it's lucrative!)

(** Note 2: Interestingly, earlier in the year one Jerome Hauer took up his new job under Tommy Thompson at the Health Department, as the advisor for bioterrorism. This is the same Jerome Hauer who developed the West Nile spraying program and, ahem, the Office of Emergency Management on Floor 23 of WTC 7, during his tenure as a terrorism adviser to the City of New York. And the same Hauer who claimed to have gotten John O'Neill his last job, as counter-terror chief at the WTC, where he died on Sept. 11th.)

The bottom line is that some very sick people in the government have gotten away with murder, both with 9/11 and with the anthrax. And the killing is still going on in Iraq and no one can even stop it now, short of incredibly massive public protests-- which simply aren't going to happen in the near future. Moreover, there is a very good chance the delusional Bush administration will try to attack Iran in the coming year.