A Second Hand Conjecture

After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential.

You could?

The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters — with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 — that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax — sent directly into the heart of the country’s elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets — that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

So that is what made everybody concerned? The twisted reasoning that could assert that after 9/11 we in any way could think something like that couldn’t happen again, sans those letters, is pretty breathtaking.  Once those letters were delivered however, it suddenly occurred to the American people that it might happen again? What kind of parallel universe is he living in? Oh, and if you couldn’t tell, this is the Sock Puppet talking. (more…)

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I would have to think Saddams bluff against the world would be up there at #1.

A possible number 2 would be Rumsfeld, in 2004, siding with decision not to publicaly release information that supported going to war.

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12652

One member of UNSCOM told this author that in April 2003, shortly after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, an Iraqi biological scientist called to tell him that part of Iraq’s biological program had been moved out of the country and part of it had been destroyed shortly before OIF began. Indeed, James R. Clapper Jr. headed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is now Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and the Director of Defense Intelligence. In October 2003, Clapper told reporters that “satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material ‘unquestionably’ had been moved out of Iraq,” as the New York Times reported.

The Iraq Survey Group learned that Iraqi intelligence operated five biological laboratories until the start of OIF. In 2004, the Pentagon debated whether to release a cache of captured Iraqi documents. Individuals familiar with those papers say they justified the war. Then Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, however, argued against publicly releasing them, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sided with Cambone. Subsequently, a handful of those documents were leaked to a small on-line news service.

Among the leaked Iraqi papers is one detailing the production of small amounts of anthrax and another detailing the production of small amounts of mustard gas. Such quantities could be used for terrorism.

via Hot Air

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