Letters to the Editor

• thelastnamechosen:

  [Read the article: The unresolved story of ABC News' false Saddam-anthrax reports]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I have an idea, why don't you get someone who has done actual testing to speak on the record and say there is no bentonite instead of arguing with me.

  USA Today, October 31, 2001-

  ABC is standing by its report, in which it quoted unidentified sources as saying that initial tests on anthrax sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle found traces of bentonite, which Iraq has used to make anthrax spores more infectious.

  This is a hot-button issue: If true, it would point the finger at Iraq's Saddam Hussein being a prime suspect in the anthrax attack -- a charge the White House has been careful not to make.

  White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Tuesday that the report by ABC News correspondent Brian Ross is wrong. He notes that Army Maj. Gen. John Parker, in charge of the investigation, has said that no traces of aluminum, a key ingredient of bentonite, have been found. . . .

  Says Fleischer: "If ABC's sources are so good, perhaps they'd like to come out and identify themselves and share the information they have, just as Gen. Parker and the White House have done. It's easier to be an anonymous source floating allegations than be an on-the-record source sharing information and taking questions."

  Gen. John Parker, "in charge of the investigation" - is that a named source? You asked that I "get someone who has done actual testing to speak on the record and say there is no bentonite." That qualifies, right?

  George Stephonopolous, to Brian Ross, October 29:

  I spoke with a senior White

  House official this morning and they are standing by their story that no test has concluded that there was bentonite in this anthrax. What is this about?

  From the Weekly Standard, April, 2002:

  The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology has performed energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy on anthrax powder recovered from at least two of last fall's letters and has apparently discovered trace amounts of silica, but no sign of aluminum, an element basic to the best-known and most common form of bentonite (montmorillonite). Based on this result, government investigators have concluded, according to the Washington Post, that "it is unlikely that the spores were originally produced in the former Soviet Union or Iraq."

  The overwhelming proponderence of the evidnece - including fro "named sources" as you define that term - make clear there was no bentonite.

  Now, I will concede to you one point. This post was 3,000 words long already. Although - as I have said before - I write for people who want to read comprehensive accounts of things and don't feel a need to shorten what I write to standard-blog-size posts, I do have to be lenght-conscious to some degree, and this post was already well longer than what my usual self-imposed limits are.

  So I had to focus on what really was important to establish and what wasn't. If you read around the anthrax literature, even among people who agree on nothing, virtually nobody still claims that the anthrax was laced with bentonite. It's all but universally assumed. So I focused on that part of the post least -- I gave some evidence to show that it was there and not something I was just making up - but since it's really not in dispute (the way it is if there was silica present in the anthrax), I wans't purporting to give some comprehensive case proving that fact.

  But the evidnece is clearly overwhelming, FROM named sources, and I doubt even ABC would claim at this point there was bentonite there (though I have asked them to respond to the points in this post).

  Can I prove to you with mathematical certainty that there was no bentonite? No. But you can't prove with mathetmatical certainty that Judy Miller's WMD claims were false. But the overwhelming evidence suggests that it is, and that is more than enough to compel an explanation from ABC.

  Permalink Monday, April 9, 2007 03:50 PM