Letters to the Editor
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@orbitboy & valentino,
The mistake y'all are making is in thinking of "an" intention. The beast has many heads, pulling in different direction - this is why conspiracies are nigh impossible to disentangle.
There are folks on the right who wanted a catastrophe - to clean the board. GG has quoted them often enough. That doesn't imply, however, that Georgie knew or understood it - I don't even know if that boy is literate (a C avg at Yale? At least he didn't fake intellect like Kerry did.) There are a multitude of intentions in contention. Some who want to steal the oil; some who want to take it off the market; some who want democracy in Iraq; some who want to institute imperial rule; some who just don't give a damn, as long as they can profiteer.
That's one of the reasons analyzing this administration is so difficult. Usually, there is a master spirit at play - a leader strong enough to be directing the conspiracies working at cross-purposes. Here we have a fool at play - his henchmen play the boss, rather than the other way around.
It's pretty clear from the Gonzalez/USAs story that the left-hand knows not what the right hand does.
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Update II
Glenn,
Thanks for the thoughtful response to my comments. At the risk of seeming picky (I fundamentally agree with your post) I want to clarify my comments about bentonite. I really am a scientist, though I am a biochemist and know nothing more about anthrax weaponization than you. However, I do know that sometimes having a written protocol and access to the necessary chemicals is not sufficient to reproduce a result, even for someone who is skilled in that particular area. Sometimes, the key to getting the desired result lies in the subtleties of just exactly how an experiment is done. Those subtleties can be difficult to impossible to adequately describe in scientific publications (or sometimes those subtleties are not adequately appreciated by the publishing scientist, and so are left out). The point is that sometimes it is the technique and not the materials that make producing something difficult.
It’s entirely reasonable to think that the Iraqis could have used bentonite precisely because it is cheap and readily available. Iraqi scientists may have found a very clever, low technology way to process bentonite such that it was particularly useful in processing anthrax. The U.S. and other countries, having access to more sophisticated materials than the Iraqis, may not have spent the time necessary to perfect the use of bentonite. Further, it is not unreasonable to think that a particular method of using bentonite could have produced markings that would be distinctive under an electron microscope (which is something I do know a bit about). Of course, the fact that there really was no bentonite in the antrhrax is proof that the electron microscopy “results” were a fabrication. However, my point here is that, given what ABC reporters were told at the time, it really was not unreasonable (and certainly not “absurd”) to think that the presence of bentonite (along with the purported electron microscopy results) was highly indicative of Iraqi involvement.
Again, the thrust of your post (that ABC news was wrong in its reporting, and hasn’t corrected their error) is unquestionable. I particularly like reading your blog because you are generally scrupulously fair in your posts. I just think that ABC wasn’t necessarily as negligent about this particular point as you made it appear in your post.
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Laura Rozen on Hatfill in TAP
She did an exhaustive piece on his background in 2002.
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2002/06/rozen-l-06-27.html
It looks similar to this:
http://forensic-intelligence.org/hatfill.pdf
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Utterly irrelevant
First of all, Glenn Greenwald is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. This particular ABC anthrax story was just one of many stories on that topic which were floating around at that time. Other countervailing theories about the anthrax attacks were offered by other news organizations contemporaneously, also allegedly backed by authoritative sources. By the time of the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, they had all been virtually forgotten.
Second of all, Glenn attempts to use this to discredit Brian Ross' current reporting on Iranian uranium enrichment. Ironically Ahmadinejad boastfully confirmed today just about all particulars of Ross' story.
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Science Guy
It’s entirely reasonable to think that the Iraqis could have used bentonite precisely because it is cheap and readily available. Iraqi scientists may have found a very clever, low technology way to process bentonite such that it was particularly useful in processing anthrax. The U.S. and other countries, having access to more sophisticated materials than the Iraqis, may not have spent the time necessary to perfect the use of bentonite.
No doubt all of that MIGHT be true. But as the source I linked to above in Comments made clear, the U.S. itself experimented with anthrax and bentonite. And even the Weekly Standard, which was trying most vigorously to promote the "bentonite = Iraq" claim, admitted in its April, 2002 article that Iraq is NOT the only country to have used bentonite in anthrax:
It has been just as widely reported, and more or less confirmed, that the Soviet and Iraqi biowarfare programs each at some point used a substance called bentonite, instead.
So sure, while it might be "entirely reasonable to think" that Iraq used bentonite in the past, that does not justify the claim that Iraq is the ONLY country to have used bentonite. And, as indicated, that claim was factually untrue.
Further, it is not unreasonable to think that a particular method of using bentonite could have produced markings that would be distinctive under an electron microscope (which is something I do know a bit about). Of course, the fact that there really was no bentonite in the antrhrax is proof that the electron microscopy “results” were a fabrication. However, my point here is that, given what ABC reporters were told at the time, it really was not unreasonable (and certainly not “absurd”) to think that the presence of bentonite (along with the purported electron microscopy results) was highly indicative of Iraqi involvement.
Two things -
(1) I have heard conflicting accounts, including from geologists and others I spoke with, that it is extremely unlikely that anyone could tell distinct forms of Iraqi bentonite from other types, but I don't know nearly enough (in fact, I know next to nothing about that) to know what's true. But more importantly:
(2) My criticism here is not necessarily of ABC's original reporting. If they were told by four sources that bentonite was found, OK - fair enough. And if people, including experts, were telling them that that is some sort of compelling proof that it's a sign of Iraqi anthrax, fair enough again. I don't have a huge problem with the original decision to report this, and didn't really focus on that.
My problem, instead, is with the conduct AFTER that - once it was revealed that those claims were false and it was clear people were inventing myths, almost certianly with a pro-Iraq-war agenda to raise public hostility toward Iraq and used ABC to do that. ABC then had multiple obligations - including full-scale retraction and explanation, if not revealing those sources - which they failed to fulfill. That is the crux of my criticism here (and I recongize that you acknowledge that fact).