Congress Has Yet to Investigate the Bioweapons Attack Against It

While Congress is about to start another hearing on Jan. 6, the 2001 anthrax attacks on Congress that induced terror, spawning invasions and the Patriot Act, have gone largely unexamined for decades

Congress has had hearing after hearing on Jan. 6, with another due to start on Wednesday. For certain elements of the Democratic Party, this has become something of a Passion Play. 

In contrast, as I note in the latest Capitol Hill Citizen, the Democrats, especially in the House, have blocked any meaningful Congressional inquiry into the origins of the pandemic which has killed millions and turned everyone’s life upside down for years.

But Jan. 6 we are told was an unprecedented attack on the Capitol, the very seat and symbol of our democracy. The massive attention paid to the attack has nothing to do with partisan politics, the Democratic Party leadership claims, but is simply defending the integrity of the foundations our nation was built upon.

But after the 9/11 attacks, Congress itself came under a false flag biowarfare attack, shutting down Congress and terrorizing the entire country.

There was never a single Congressional inquiry.

The effects of the 2001 anthrax attacks could hardly have been more far reaching.

Someone mailed letters with deadly anthrax to a series of targets including Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

The two had been raising concerns about the Patriot Act, which the Bush/Cheney administration wanted to ram through Congress after 9/11. 

The anthrax letters were a "false flag" attack. That is, whoever sent them deceptively tried to pin the attacks on innocents. In this case, Arabs or Muslims. Text in the anthrax letters included the date “9-11-01” and the words: “You can not stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is Great.”

Brian Ross of ABC claimed repeatedly that the spores in the attack letters had been coated in bentonite — the Iraqi method of weaponization. Ross’s anonymous government sources who claimed Iraq was the culprit were shown to be lying, but ABC to this day still protects their identity. Why? (See my piece "Should Media Expose Sources Who Lied to Them?") 

The 9/11 attacks were obviously a major traumatic event, but the anthrax attacks which followed sent fear to virtually everyone in the country. People were frightened to open their mail. The terror was palpable. Many could hardly think straight. With much of the public gripped by panic, Bush, Cheney and company succeeded in getting the so-called Patriot Act through. Bush and Cheney also launched the invasion of Afghanistan during this period and would launch the deceptive campaign to invade Iraq a year later, in the Fall of 2002, exactly 20 years ago. 

Graeme MacQueen, author of The Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, notes: “By the end of 2001, however, all stories of foreign terrorists had collapsed. The nature of the spore preparations revealed the operation as an inside job — the spores came from one of three possible labs, all inside the U.S. and serving the military and the CIA.”

The FBI would try to pin blame for the attacks on a series of individuals. Its case fell apart each time. Eventually, it blamed Fort Detrick Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins. Just then, he died of an alleged suicide. So no case was brought forward. There was no trial. 

In 2008, Leahy, one of the targets of the attacks, told then-FBI head Robert Mueller, who claimed that deceased government scientist Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator: “I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people.”

In 2010, President Obama actually threatened to veto a move to investigate the anthrax attacks.

In 2015 Richard Lambert, who was for some years the Inspector in Charge of the FBI’s anthrax investigation, charged that “While Bruce Ivins may have been the anthrax mailer, there is a wealth of exculpatory evidence to the contrary which the FBI continues to conceal from Congress and the American people.”

Lambert said: “I absolutely do not think they could have proved his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” The New York Times reported: “He declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.”

While postal workers and other were dying from the anthrax in 2001, Judy Miller of the New York Times would get harmless powder that appeared to be anthrax, causing her to become a major media figure; her book Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War had just come out.

Whitney Webb has noted the role of others like Robert Kadlec, who was the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Trump administration; it was a position he actually helped create during the Bush administration during which time he help produce the Dark Winter bioterrorism exercise held in June 2001.

Immediately after the events of September 11, 2001, Kadlec became a special advisor on biological warfare to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. In the days that followed, Rumsfeld openly and publicly stated that he expected America’s enemies, specifically Saddam Hussein, to aid unspecified terrorist groups in obtaining chemical and biological weapons, a narrative that was analogous to that used in the Dark Winter exercise that Kadlec had helped create.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Dark Winter’s other co-authors — Randall Larsen, Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby — personally briefed Dick Cheney on Dark Winter, at a time when Cheney and his staff had been warned by another Dark Winter figure, Jerome Hauer, to take the antibiotic Cipro to prevent anthrax infection. It is unknown how many members of the administration were taking Cipro and for how long.

Also see Webb’s interview with Robbie Martin from last year.

Several times, including in 2011, shortly before the tenth anniversary of the anthrax attacks, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), who is a scientist, introduced the Anthrax Attacks Investigation Act. It never got anywhere. 

Journalists Bob Coen and Eric Nadler produced the documentary Anthrax War, which was aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The documentary features Leahy asking Mueller: “These weapons that were used against the American people — and they’re weapons; they’re weapons — the weapons that were used against the American people and Congress — are you aware of any facility in the United States that is capable of making the weapons that were used on Congress and the American people besides Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, and the Battelle facility in West Jefferson, Ohio?” Mueller would not respond in public.

Anthrax War quotes noted scientist, Jonathan King, a professor of molecular biology at MIT: “The response to the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism initiative has been to launch a nationwide billion-dollar campaign to, quote ‘defend us from unknown terrorists.’ But the character of this program is roughly as follows. You say well, what would the terrorists come up with? What’s the nastiest, most dangerous, most difficult to diagnose, difficult to treat, microorganisms that we can think of? Well, let’s go bring that organism into existence, so that we can figure out how to defend against that. The fact of the matter is, it’s indistinguishable from an offensive program in which you would do the same thing.”

Anthrax War also features Putin charging that, as a result of U.S. government actions: “It’s now obvious that a fresh round of a new arms race has started.”

Indeed, the U.S. government perversely drastically increased funding for biodefense/biowarfare after the anthrax attacks, a prime example of putting out the fire with gasoline. And that’s just one of many consequences of the attacks that has not had a reckoning.

It is beyond depraved that no real investigation took place regarding the anthrax attacks. Congress in 2001 was gripped by fear and failed to fulfill any legitimate democratic function or to be a meaningful check on an administration intent on repression and war. 

What's Congress's excuse for not investigating the attacks in the two decades since? Or now?

Andrew Sullivan, an influential writer, in October 2001, during the anthrax biowarfare attack, effectively argued for nuking Iraq, writing the piece “The Coming Conflict": 

We have to extend it to Iraq. It is by far the most likely source of this weapon; it is clearly willing to use such weapons in the future; and no war against terrorism of this kind can be won without dealing decisively with the Iraqi threat. We no longer have any choice in the matter. Slowly, incrementally, a Rubicon has been crossed. The terrorists have launched a biological weapon against the United States. They have therefore made biological warfare thinkable and thus repeatable. We once had a doctrine that such a Rubicon would be answered with a nuclear response. We backed down on that threat in the Gulf War but Saddam didn’t dare use biological weapons then. Someone has dared to use them now. Our response must be as grave as this new threat. I know that this means that this conflict is deepening and widening beyond its initial phony stage. But what choice do we have? Inaction in the face of biological warfare is an invitation for more in a world where that is now thinkable.

Sullivan is in fact correct on his last point: "Inaction in the face of biological warfare is an invitation for more in a world where that is now thinkable."

It's just that the "terrorists" aren't foreign Arabs or Muslims, but elements within the U.S. government. 

Sam Husseini is an independent journalist writing at husseini.substack.com.