Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has been trying to push back against the media meme that the FBI has solved the anthrax case with the suicide of scientist Bruce Ivins. The government released its heavily redacted evidence today. It’s unclear whether it will answer questions raised by one of the few skeptical stories to appear, in the New York Times. Or the AP report of the high-pressure tactics the Feds used on Ivins and his family.
Let’s put this into context. We now know that the Bush administration fabricated intelligence to capitalize on the national trauma of 9/11 and to gain a pretext for war with Iraq. Even more evidence comes from a new book by Ron Suskind, who has been spot-on in reporting the inside intrigues of this White House. The head of Iraqi intelligence was working for the CIA and reported that Saddam had no WMDs. He was paid $5 million of your tax dollars to disappear before the invasion. Later, the CIA was pressured by the White House to fabricate a memo from the Iraqi spook saying that 9/11 terrorist Mohammad Atta had trained in Iraq (he hadn’t) and that Saddam was buying yellow-cake uranium in Niger (he wasn’t).
The Bush administration, with its unprecedented secrecy, power grabs, torture and rendition, had created a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists, notably about 9/11. Unfortunately, as facts keep emerging it’s clear that the skeptics aren’t all kooks. Skepticism should be mainstream. Do you believe we know all the facts behind 9/11? And why did the administration oppose creating an independent commission to study the attacks — then carefully steer it and ignore it?
Thus Ivins. Maybe we have a mad scientist driven by the eternal octane of crimes: jealousy, anger, dark passions. The science of evidence doesn’t lie — we know this from television’s CSI and Patricia Cornwell novels — except any cop can tell you it does, that mistakes happen, evidence is inconclusive or mishandled or downright wrong. Closing the case with Ivins allows "us" to move on, and not recall that the anthrax attacks helped keep the politically useful pre-war hysteria going. It’s going still, as John McCain keeps using the fear card.
Federal law enforcement leaking has been wrong before, as when it declared scientist Steven Hatfill a "person of interest" in the attacks. Later several millions of your dollars were handed over to the innocent man to settle his lawsuit against the Feds. And back in the 1960s, Hoover’s FBI sent a file of sexually incriminating "evidence" about Martin Luther King Jr. to his office with a note suggesting he kill himself to avoid disclosure. Hmmm.
We are similarly left to wonder what went on during Vice President Cheney’s secret meetings with top oil executives early in the first Bush term. Did they discuss the reality of peak oil and how to milk the most out of the asset before the roof caved in? Did they talk about the need for pre-emptive war to seize Iraq’s oil fields to protect world markets in the coming global confrontations over energy? We don’t know.
Is it any wonder so many have become extreme skeptics about their own government, which has become infinitely less trustworthy and competent than in the days when J. Edgar stalked the "communist" Dr. King.
Unfortunately, the death of newspapers and the common information culture they represented leave intelligent, skeptical people isolated on the Internet and in the last remaining good newspapers. And they seem to be a minority, with most of the country deadened by television and stuff — conditioned to see those with an interest in our government and current events as "elitists." Who knows what’s really going on, from your local city hall to an increasingly intertwined world, with most newspapers cut back to trivial "local local" coverage?
As Greenwald points out, until we have vigorous congressional hearings — and I would add conqseuences for the liars — we won’t really know. On anthrax or anything else. And that won’t come if the election ends up validating the past shameful eight years,
Your post touches on an important point. There is a huge difference between a fact (of evidence, for example) and conclusions that you can draw about causes and meaning.
As I read on another site a few days ago, finding a fingerprint may be a fact, but concluding that the owner of the finger was at the scene may not be true. The most common means of leaving a fingerprint is the finger it’s on, but that is not the only way. Also concluding that the print was left at the time of the crime may stretch the technology’s ability.
I’m not saying that fingerprints aren’t useful – they are. Also, pursuing the line that the owner of the finger was there is the most probable cause (of the print). Confusing the known facts with the conclusions one draws from them is where mistakes are most often made. We call it jumping to conclusions.
Conspiracy theories flourish when governments become sinkholes of secrecy. Still, I like to think that the sheer incompetence and buffoonery of the Bush administration shows all is not lost. As bad as they’ve been, at least we’ve had some insight into their activities. And while the CIA is far from clean here, it is a recognizably human organization with backstabbing, turf wars, and leaks.
We knew enough three years ago to impeach Bush. We didn’t do it because reality itself is fractured into market niches. Wingnuttia may well be the strongest niche of all. Democrats understood the odds and saw a losing battle ahead. Still, it was the morally right thing to do even if the politics didn’t compute.
Most left-wing blogs critique our media culture for obvious reasons. FWIW, we’re still a long way from any kind of rebalancing of the public interest with corporate behemoths. It will have to be blogs like this that keep the spotlight on them. While the odds seem long that we’ll reach parity with the right-wing noise machine, I suspect an Obama victory would be a huge game-changer. Imagine a popular black president in a country that made a white victimologist (Rush Limbaugh) its most-heard commentator? Couple that with favorable demographic changes and America will re-engage reality sooner rather than later.
Well, as long as we’re trotting out examples, let’s not forget Richard Jewell. In fact, the list could go on indefinitely.
What this really proves is that Americans cannot and should not accept the claims of their government (or any arbitrary faction of it) on faith — a lesson which one might have supposed that they would have learned a couple hundred years ago had it not been for a combination of propaganda in the schools, the churches, the mass media, and in the families conditioned by these influences, as well as by a natural desire to believe that “our side” are the good guys, and that those vested with power over society for the nominal purpose of protecting it actually use it for that purpose, or at least don’t deliberately abuse it (including using it to cover up their mistakes at someone’s expense).
The problem is that the phenomenon of government corruption does not allow one to make the converse assumption either: one simply can’t conclude that because the government lied in cases X, Y and Z that it is also lying in cases P and Q. It might or might not be, and the only thing that can determine this (insofar far as conditional truths, which can always be undermined by additional information, CAN be “determined”), is to carefully and systematically sift through the evidence of each specific case. General principles such as “the government has routinely lied and may be lying even now” simply don’t permit one to arrive at a conclusion regarding a specific case, though they ought to counsel skepticism.
For that matter, I doubt whether press reports are sufficient in the general instance to “try” a case. One needs to examine the primary evidence, systematically and with expert judgment, and that is often unavailable (or may even be insufficient when it is available).
I’m a big believer in examination of evidence and a scientific approach to fighting crime. It’s a sad fact that the FBI have demonstrated on many occasions that they are quite the opposite — evidence is there to be used only when convenient, manufactured if necessary. You only have to study the Judi Bari case to see just how different the real FBI is to their television fantasy representation.
Indeed, the conspiracy nuts have been the ones dragging over evidence in all these cases. For example, Ivins was reported as suicide by acetaminophen poisoning. This method of suicide is probably the slowest and most painful. It takes many days for the persons liver to gradually fail and then the rest of the person’s metabolism to break down. Ivins had enough medical experience to understand this, let’s presume he wanted to die painfully.
We are told that Ivins’ wife, Diane, “found him unresponsive on the floor and called for help,” and she somehow she had not noticed that he had been spending the last few days in agony with a gradually collapsing liver? Did Ivins really have such ability to withstand pain that he could hide his own slow death from his wife for nearly a week?
Go and research acetaminophen/paracetamol poisoning and then look at the Ivins case — it makes no sense at all.
Even CSI doesn’t have plot loopholes as big as that.
Apparently Ivins mixed acetominaphen with codeine.
https://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-anthrax1-2008aug01,0,2864223.story
This could both accelerate the process and reduce painful side-effects. It might also produce a lapse into coma that initially could be mistaken for sleep. By the time it was realized that the individual was sleeping too heavily, past their normal time to get up, and could not be roused, it could be too late.
“Never mix different medications if both medications contain acetaminophen, except if instructed to do so by your doctor. For example, acetaminophen with codeine and cold medicine containing acetaminophen should not be taken together. Read product labels. They clearly indicate the contents.”
https://www.emedicinehealth.com/acetaminophen_tylenol_poisoning/page9_em.htm
The FBI (and its crime lab) have been heavily criticized (sometimes by insiders), and neither the pronouncements of the agency’s field investigators and administrators, nor of its technical branch, should be accepted on faith or assumed to have been tendered in good faith. But that seems to be irrelevant to the overdose itself. Note the source of the information in the L.A. Times story linked to above.
I may have given the erroneous impression that mixing codeine with acetaminophen in and of itself produces a lethal witches brew. If so, I now take the opportunity to correct this mistaken view:
https://www.rxlist.com/cgi/generic/acetcod.htm
The key words, in the L.A. Times article, are apparently “massive dose” in the context of a prescription formulation. The emedicinehealth.com warning I cited was apparently concerned with mixing two or more medications both of which contain acetaminophen (because of the potential for overdose ingestion of acetaminophen) rather than mixing codeine and acetaminaphen per se.
That said, my comments about the effects of codeine, when taken in conjunction with acetaminophen in overdose quantities, might nonetheless address the objections articulated by Tel.