All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's time to welcome today's guest, Christopher Ketchum, he's a freelance reporter and writer for many venues including Antiwar.com, Harper's, GQ, The Nation, Salon, Mother Jones, Men's Journal, Good Magazine, Radar Magazine, National Geographic.
We've interviewed him on this show about controversial subjects before and he certainly tackled a controversial one this time from the American conservative magazine, The Anthrax Files.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
Hey, how you doing?
I'm doing good.
How are you?
Pretty good.
Still alive.
Well, that's good.
Nobody's sent anthrax your way, I hope.
No, no.
You've got to be careful which fights you pick here, man.
All right, so this article in the American conservative magazine, you're singing my tune here in terms of skepticism about the case against this guy, Bruce Ivins.
The government came out, what, last month and said, well, this one guy did it and he's dead now and that ought to be good enough for you.
And it seemed like there was a little bit of controversy even in the Times and the Post they talked about.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.right?
That's right.
That's right.
Problem solved.
No need to look any further.
Move along, folks.
You better, you better.
But yeah, it was actually quite surprising that the mainstream media did express the skepticism, the level of skepticism about the FBI's targeting of or fingering of Ivins as the lone anthrax killer, and a lot of the evidence just didn't add up.
In fact, you know, he had passed two polygraph tests.
The grand jury investigating the evidence presented against him was weeks away from issuing any sort of decision.
They had not issued a true bill in his case, and yet the guy up and kills himself, and suddenly the FBI says, oh, it's case solved, close the Amerithrax investigation, on to other things.
All right.
Now, I don't want to sound like a kook about this, but I think it's a worthy question.
I think I already know the answer.
Is there any reason for you to be suspicious about how this guy died, the suicide?
Is that suspicious at all?
I mean, that is a way to, you know, a lot of times if you're trying, if you're a hit man, you try to murder somebody, make it look like a suicide, right?
That's how it says on Hollywood movies.
One source wrote me saying, you know, Chris, look into the whole idea.
He died from a prescription painkiller, Tylenol of codeine, a very, quite common painkiller.
So a source wrote me, look into the whole idea of whether Ivins was sensitive to the respiratory effects of opiates, of morphine-like drugs, because this has been known to be used to cause respiratory failure in those who are sensitive to it, but whatever.
I mean, we have no evidence of that, and hey, if he was murdered by the government, I wouldn't be surprised, but, you know, we don't know.
Yeah, my question was simply whether there's really any reason to be suspicious beyond the fact that this was a controversial case.
I know some people were saying that, sure, he killed himself, but if you read buried in the article, they admit he was in a government mental hospital at the time, but I didn't see that in the article.
I saw that he had been in the mental hospital a couple of weeks before, but I guess my best understanding was he was, you know, at his own house when he ate these pills or something.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's my understanding as well.
Listen, the guy was under terrific pressure.
The FBI was approaching, in probably the most vile manner possible, his children to turn against him.
They were offering bribes to his son and approaching his daughter on her hospital bed with, you know, pictures of the anthrax victims and describing in horrific terms how her father was a killer, and they offered his son millions of dollars to turn evidence against him.
So, you know, I mean, here's a guy who, we don't know whether he did it or not because the process by which the FBI singled him out has been so tainted.
So it's like the evidentiary process has been shattered here.
Right.
And now, you know, this isn't just an episode of the cold case files on A&E or something here.
This is extremely important because after the September 11th attacks, as you point out in your article, when this anthrax came as what seemed a follow-up to the 9-11 attacks, that's what created the 90% approval rating and the carte blanche for the Republicans to rain hell on whoever is behind all this terrible stuff.
Yeah, that's right.
The anthrax attacks came at a very opportune moment in terms of the reactionary forces that were rising in the United States at the time, pushing the Patriot Act, pushing a massive increase in funding for the military-industrial complex, pushing the war, the invasion of Afghanistan, prepping the American public for the invasion of Iraq by making the false connection between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein.
This is a connection that was harped on over and over and over by the usual crew of creeps over at the Weekly Standard, etc., etc.
Right, Robert Kagan and William Crystal, and of course, Lori Milroy, who's a favorite of mine.
She's the lady who was always trying to say that Ramzi Youssef, the al-Qaeda guy, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew, the guy that cooked the bomb for the first World Trade Center attack, that he was really a secret Iraqi agent who had stolen Ramzi Youssef's identity and was also responsible for the Oklahoma bombing and all these other things.
That's right, that's right.
In Lori Milroy's world, we're all secret Iraqi agents.
Is that how that works?
Why else would we be up here criticizing her work if we weren't working for Saddam Hussein?
I can't think of another explanation.
Well, obviously we're working for Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda together.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
In fact, you and I are the connection between the two that justifies the war in 1903.
That's right.
It finally caught us, Scott.
All right, now seriously here, let me play Cheney's advocate as best I can here.
I think that you're a detailed and decent enough reporter.
You've done your homework enough on this case.
I would like for you to try your best to explain what the evidence is against this guy from the FBI's point of view.
What is their narrative about why it is that they're pretty sure that these things, what things, and then how is it they're saying that this adds up to a case against Ivins?
All right, the Ivins evidence, I mean, it's all circumstantial.
It's that he exhibited wacky behavior.
He was sometimes aggressive in his letter writing to editorial boards, to local newspapers.
He liked to drink alcohol.
He had a beef with the U.S. government.
He had expressed in past documents or letters that bio-warfare or bio-defense funding needed a boost.
You know, a lot of stuff that just adds up to, well, a whole lot of suggestions.
He had apparently once been obsessed with a sorority in the same area of Princeton where the letters were sent, but he was obsessed with the sorority 27 years ago.
So again, it's a very fragmentary evidence that there was no, for example, no DNA connection was made between the anthrax that he handled and the anthrax in the letters, which of course, I mean, that's the real, the heart and soul of the evidence that should have been presented.
And meanwhile, there are whole portions of the FBI file against the guy that has not been declassified.
So we don't know the whole story.
So again, it's fragmentary, perhaps contradictory, certainly circumstantial.
And you know, as even the New York Times noted, some of the various mainstream papers noted, it just, it doesn't have the kind of weight that you'd expect the FBI to bring to bear on a case that is as important as this one.
Well, they spent so much time blaming innocent people, surprised they didn't blame Richard Jewell for this one.
I don't know.
Okay.
So there's this New York Times article from the other day.
You talked with Francis Boyle for this article you wrote.
There's this New York Times article, I guess a couple of weeks back now, where they talk about doubts in the case.
While ridiculing anyone who has doubts, they detail throughout the article, including what apparently some very qualified scientists find themselves being very skeptical when the FBI claims that they're somehow by some natural process, perhaps magic, or perhaps some scientific thing that they've never observed before.
This anthrax was able to spontaneously create a coating of silica so that it would be aerosolized.
The scientists there are saying that, well, the FBI agents are saying, well, we've been able to recreate, you know, how he did all this and everything.
And then when somebody asks, well, what about the silica?
They said, well, we're pretty sure it just happens that way, that sometimes anthrax grows silica on it or something.
They're just leading it at that.
Yeah.
My understanding, first of all, is that the FBI did not share with scientists the exact process by which they, quote unquote, replicated what they're alleging Ivins to have done, i.e. weaponizing to anthrax.
Second of all, what I've been told by bioweapons experts is that anthrax doesn't just grow silica.
That's part of the weaponization process, so it can be aerosolized, so it can float around and get into people's lungs.
So you have talked to bioweapons scientists who have told you that, no, silica doesn't grow naturally on anthrax.
No, it doesn't.
Yes.
It does not grow naturally on anthrax.
But my understanding, I don't even know.
Right.
To be perfectly clear, you're not a biologist or anything, but you have talked to these guys.
You're a reporter and you've done your research on this.
That's right.
That's right.
Right.
Okay.
Now, also something that you mentioned in your article is that this guy's work was on vaccines and apparently there are some of his colleagues there saying this guy would not have known how to do this.
And best the FBI can say is, well, maybe he picked it up at some point or something because he was nearby.
Yes.
Well, he apparently did not have the expertise needed to manufacture the type of anthrax that was in the letters, this weaponized, aerosolized, high-grade, highly complex anthrax.
And in fact, the bigger question that I bring up in the article is that there's a lot of evidence suggesting that no one at Fort Detrick, and Fort Detrick, of course, is all along the end, sort of ground zero of the investigation, that no one at Fort Detrick had the capacity to make this incredibly powerful version of anthrax, that it had to have been manufactured somewhere else.
Francis Boyle, who I talked to, who was the source for the article, who was the author of the Bioweapons Convention Act of 1989, he told me that he thinks that it was manufactured at the Thugway Proving Ground.
Oh, by the way, that's the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, that's Boyle's legislation.
And what's Proving Ground now?
What's it called?
Thugway Proving Ground, which is a highly secret U.S. Army facility, or it might be U.S. Air Force facility, in Utah, in the deserts of Utah.
Continue, please.
So, you know, Boyle and several others who knew Ivins or were familiar with the work in the labs at Fort Detrick have said, no, this anthrax could not have been produced at Fort Detrick.
But, again, then we get into a guessing game.
I mean, Boyle has suggested that this anthrax was the result of some sort of top-secret or classified CIA program that was developing these new strains of anthrax in violation of the very law that he helped author, and in violation of international law.
Now, there is some suggestion of evidence pointing to this.
Well, you know, this is a pet peeve of mine, actually, because I remembered this as soon as the anthrax thing broke.
I said, wait a minute, I remember there was an article in the New York Times in August of 2001 all about how the Bush administration was starting up this weaponized anthrax program in opposition or in violation or, you know, direct kind of flagrant going around the treaties to the contrary and so forth.
And I went back and looked for that thing a hundred times, and I never could find it until finally this Bruce Ivins thing came and some blogger got it right.
And the reason I couldn't find it is because it wasn't August.
It was September 4th, 2001.
Judy Miller in the New York Times.
It was Judy Miller.
Wow.
Well, she got something right for once.
Huh.
Yeah.
And wasn't she a recipient of one of these letters or a bogus letter or something like that?
I think she was a recipient of a bogus letter.
I'm not certain.
Okay.
Yeah.
But anyway, so that's the article.
It's September 4th, 2001, New York Times, a secret project to create a deadly anthrax strain.
That's right.
That's right.
Earlier this year, administration officials said the Pentagon drew up plans to engineer genetically a potentially more potent variant of the bacterium that causes anthrax.
So yes, I mean, it was out there on the front pages of the Times that the administration was pursuing some sort of secret program involving anthrax.
And lo and behold, two months later, suddenly this anthrax is in Congress and in the newsrooms of major media.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, that's funny.
Oh, today's the 5th.
I was thinking today was the 4th.
Okay.
So it's not a coincidence.
But yeah.
Anyway, I found the article here.
It's called U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits.
It's Judith Miller, Steven Engelberg, and William Broad.
Right.
Right.
You know, in the American Conservative article, I make the point that the BBC reported in 2002 that the CIA may have been, quote, unquote, investigating methods of sending anthrax through the mail, and that the program went, quote, unquote, madly out of control.
Quite madly if it was high-level Democratic senators, the majority leader of the Senate who was on the receiving end.
So that sounds like a little more than just a test, but wow.
But we don't know anything more about that than the BBC article?
No, we don't.
I mean, we just have suggestions of possibilities from the sources like Francis Boyle.
Again, you know, it very easily devolves into the abstractions of conspiracy theory, unfortunately.
Well, I think it's okay to speculate as long as you call your speculation speculation and you don't confuse, you know, reporting with, you know, it looks like it could have been this or that.
I think that's still fair to discuss.
Right.
Well, you know, there is the bigger issue that in the wake of the anthrax attacks, suddenly bio, quote, unquote, biodefense funding skyrocketed and it went up by billions upon billions of dollars.
Now, this would not have happened if it weren't for the anthrax attacks.
So what Bruce Ivins had complained about was lack of funding for biodefense.
Well, that question was suddenly answered.
So if you think of motivation here, well, the motivation might have been pretty damn clear.
If the attacker was in a biowarfare establishment, then his motivation was money, funding, an increase in funding to an increase in funding that has gotten spread out among all sorts of corporations, large and small, that are part of the military industrial complex.
As you say, that's the FBI's theory about why Bruce Ivins did it.
So it's just as plausible that it could be others in the in the very same biowarfare industry.
Right.
Well, we'll never know now because the investigation is shut down and we're on to invading Iran.
So yeah, or Russia.
Now another thing here is that this was Bush's enemies that got it right.
This was Leahy and Daschle in the Senate is Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, the Democrats on, you know, major TV news.
And then what was the deal with the National Enquirer crew down in Florida?
Hadn't they been running a bunch of stories about Bush's daughters and that kind of thing?
It's not too hard to use your imagination and see that, you know, perhaps this thing was ordered out of the White House, you know?
God, I don't know.
Do you know the story about the guy in Florida?
You know, Leahy and Daschle both were key players in holding up the Patriot Act.
And then they they got the anthrax letters, Congress was shut down and the Patriot Act suddenly passed.
Yeah.
Bunch of weird coincidences, that's for sure.
And certainly another this was another enormous benefit to the reactionary forces in American life that resulted from from the anthrax attacks.
And now we know from the principle of crisis and Leviathan, the ratchet effect that you don't need for the people who benefit from a crisis don't need to be the ones behind it.
You know, any politician is going to try to benefit from any kind of disruption.
We don't I don't want to assume too much, but I do want to keep an open mind at the same time, you know.
And now there's certainly what I would think if I was part of the crew in the mystery machine would be the number one biggest clue.
Some solid evidence that actually exists in time and space somewhere is this letter that was sent to the FBI implicating a guy named Assad who worked at the Fort Detrick laboratory before anybody even knew that anybody got any anthrax in the mail.
Yeah, that's right.
Ayad Assad was a researcher at Fort Detrick working with various pathogens.
And the FBI was sent a letter stating that the letter that, as you say, suggested some sort of foreknowledge of the attack, that is, the letter was sent to FBI prior to anyone finding out about the first anthrax letters.
And in this letter implicating Assad, you know, it was stated that he might be, you know, a terrorist or, you know, that he might have something to do with the anthrax attacks.
The FBI investigated Assad, quickly exonerated him, and then completely just ignored the wealth of evidence that would have been provided in the letter.
Now, this is pretty incredible.
I mean, you have a letter that, by the way, the letter whose language reflected somewhat the language in the anthrax letters themselves.
Meanwhile, you had a language forensics expert who reviewed the Assad letter and linked its language to that of a female officer at Fort Detrick.
Well, none of this was ever followed through, at least according to the public record that the FBI has made available.
Now, have they outright said that they have not followed this up, or there's just no evidence that they have?
There's just no, it's just like, it's the elephant in the room, it's just ignored.
When I called FBI for comment on this, they just wouldn't return my phone calls.
Well, I mean, at some point, they actually sent a copy of this letter to the guy trying to find out who wrote it.
He was a handwriting expert.
This guy, what's his name?
Foster?
Yeah, Don Foster.
That's who I'm talking about.
The forensics expert.
And this guy, he linked this letter up.
Well, they didn't know.
They didn't send it to him voluntarily.
He requested a copy of the letter.
He got a copy of the letter, and because he had previously helped the FBI in fingering the 1996 Atlanta bomber and in identifying Joe Kline, you know, the author of Primary Colors.
So he had, you know, served them effectively in the past, so they sent him the letter.
And again, in his review of it, he made a direct link between the language in the letter and the documentation that had been prepared by a female researcher for Dietrich.
Now, you know, nothing came of this or, you know, and nothing will ever come of it because the AmeriFax investigation is shut down.
That's it.
Ivan killed himself and is over with all this evidence.
All this mystery is going to hang out there probably for maybe for all time.
And we'll never and we'll never know.
Yeah.
Well, I think they kind of like it that way, too.
Yeah.
I don't know, man.
It's hard to chalk that up to incompetence.
You know, I think I read a quote of that guy, Foster, saying, yeah, they they zero filed the thing.
They just they didn't seem to be interested in this.
And I'm thinking, look, if you're an actual cop, not a not an FBI politician supervisor, but you're an actual federal cop and you're on to this clue, you didn't have any interest in it.
You zero filed it.
Who was instructed to cover that up?
Come on.
We can safely speculate that much, can't we?
Yeah.
Well, it's certainly wouldn't be beyond the pale at FBI.
Yeah.
I mean, that is incredible.
I mean, just to rehearse that a little bit, to be perfectly clear, somebody sends some anthrax in the mail.
The FBI gets a letter saying, hey, this guy did it.
The FBI immediately concludes didn't do it.
But they get that letter before anybody even knows there's been an anthrax attack.
Then you have a handwriting expert who's the guy who figured out that the anonymously published book Primary Colors was actually written by Joe Klein from Time magazine.
He looks at the anthrax letters.
He looks at this letter implicating the innocent man, Assad, and he reviews writings of other people at Fort Detrick and makes a link between the writings, separate writings of someone at Fort Detrick and the letter implicating Assad and the anthrax letters themselves.
And the FBI pays no mind to this whatsoever and decides to look the other way.
Do I understand that right?
Yeah, that's right.
It's pretty lunacy or sheer total incompetence or the result of orders from on high to stand down, as you suggest.
I mean, again, it's one of these mysteries that is going to continue to feed into conspiracy theory and speculation.
And it's an awful thing in American life because so much of our of our public life now is veiled in secrecy.
So much of the operations of our government disappears into the black hole of covert operations or the need to know basis.
I mean, that's not I mean, that is alone odious to democracy.
It stinks to high heaven.
Well, now, this guy, Assad, who the FBI decided couldn't possibly be the guy they're looking for.
He said, hey, you know, you ought to look at this guy, Philip Zack, and this other lady, I forget her name.
You ought to look at her name because they hurt me.
Right.
I'm sorry.
What?
Marion Rippey was the two people that Assad suggested wrote the letter where Philip Zack was also a doctor at Fort Detrick and his colleague, Marion Rippey, a female operative at Fort Detrick with whom Zack was having an extramarital affair.
Now, a lot of the speculation has centered around these two.
So I want to make sure and try to get a couple of facts straight.
Their vendetta against this guy, Assad, was in the days after the first Gulf War and they were fired from Fort Detrick in 1992, right?
1992, maybe 94.
I'm not sure of the exact date.
OK.
And now the whole thing about this guy, Zack, and I'm not trying to acquit the guy or anything, but it just seems like there's a lot of people going off half cocked about it.
And I want to just make sure I understand it right, that this guy was apparently surveilled on video being allowed in to the Fort Detrick lab after he was fired by friends and co-worker, former co-workers there, and apparently had access to where they keep some of the anthrax.
But then even that was still back then in the early 1990s, not in the days right before the attack or anything.
It was in 1994 that he came under video surveillance.
OK, so that's mid-90s at least.
But now, do we know anything...
That was a long time ago, is the point.
Right.
And so that would tend to indicate, according to the scientists you've talked to, that that anthrax would not be associated with the anthrax in these letters, or...
Not necessarily.
Not necessarily.
You know, it just seemed to me, in terms of the DAC angle, I really didn't look into it very closely.
It just seemed to me extreme speculation.
The point here is not so much DAC or RIPI, it's the point, I think, is what the FBI failed to do.
Right.
And what the FBI has done with the real, you know, the tangible, solid evidence that would have formed the ground of a real investigation.
So, yeah, there's been a lot of blog speculation and a lot of writers out there who have attacked Zach for various reasons and implicated him, but I don't think, you know, I don't think we need to go that far.
I think the real problem lies with our government investigators, with the, again, the failure over and over and over to probe where the facts lead, and we didn't in this case.
Yeah.
Well, and I think that's right, that that should be the focus, is that, you know, these people have a monopoly on these kind of investigations.
It's their job and nobody else's, and yet they won't do it.
And this case reminds me a lot of conversations I had with the FBI crime lab whistleblower, Frederick Whitehurst, years ago.
He told me that the idea that an FBI agent, you know, the average street cop type or whatever, doing his job, the average special agent out there, the idea that he could go to his boss and say, hey, boss, I stumbled onto this stuff, I got these clues, I think I can build a case against these people, here's what I need and this is what I'll do, and for that boss to say, oh, good work, Jenkins, you get to work, it would be a miracle that in no case ever does an FBI supervisor do the right thing on anything, was basically Fred Whitehurst's point of view.
He said they walked in at graduation day and said, who wants to be a supervisor?
The people who really wanted to be cops kept their hands down, and the people who wanted to be politicians raised theirs and became the bosses, and that the whole place is just one big cluster F, that they couldn't possibly get anything done, even if they were trying, these guys.
They can't even email each other right.
Yeah.
I mean, that's why, you know, again and again I find myself in conversations with people talking about, you know, the 9-11 attacks, for example, as a big organized conspiracy, and I just have to say, no, the government is incompetent.
Our government is a wreck.
This thing doesn't work.
It's dysfunctional.
It's a huge, top-heavy bureaucracy, and they don't get anything done.
So yeah, I mean, FBI failures in the Ameritrax investigation may have simply been due to their monstrous incompetence and the monstrosity of the bureaucracy failing to pivot and to be able to react to new evidence in a timely fashion, in a sort of spontaneously creative fashion.
Yeah.
You know, I figured out why I keep going back to all these details while you keep trying to kind of wrap it up to the big picture.
I keep going back because I just don't want to let it go, man.
I don't want to admit that this case is closed, and that's the end of that.
There's supposed to be a freaking article coming out in the journal Nature saying, what the hell are you talking about, FBI?
You don't make any sense.
This isn't supposed to be over yet.
The crime isn't solved, man.
No.
But, you know, the American people have been issued their marching orders.
They're to forget anything ever happened with regard to Amtrax and move on.
Part of the rolling amnesia of American life.
Yeah, you know, I always wanted to ask Timothy McVeigh who John Doe number two was, but now he's dead.
And I guess I would like to ask Bruce Ivins who helped him do the Amtrax attack, or who does he think did it, or what does he have to say about all this so-called evidence against him?
But I guess I can't ask him because now he's dead too, and that's just the end of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, when you look at the pattern here, prior to Bruce Ivins, there was the hapless Stephen Hatfield, who was hounded by the bureau and persecuted in various ways and accused of being the Amtrax killer.
And then, lo and behold, a month and a half ago, two months ago, the FBI settles with them for $5.8 million because they had the wrong guy all along.
But they tortured Mr. Hatfield over the years in trying to get people around him to turn evidence against him, just as they did with Ivins.
Hatfield stood up to the pressure and told the FBI to go to hell.
Ivins killed himself, at least that's what we're told.
And, you know, there's a lot of suggestion out there that, you know, this guy was a wreck because of what the FBI was doing.
Right.
The pressure.
He would sit at a...
One person said, told the Associated Press, he would sit at his desk and weep.
Right.
And this is, again, for people tuning in late.
This guy, they had offered to buy his son a sports car and give him millions of dollars.
They'd shown his daughter while she was in the hospital, I think, on some unrelated thing.
They showed her, came and showed her pictures of people dying of anthrax and said it was all her father's fault and all this stuff.
And that broke this guy.
He didn't have a Stephen Hatfield kind of fortitude about him.
And he couldn't stand up to the pressure.
And breaking him effectively solved the case.
Getting him to kill himself was the best thing the FBI has done in this case.
Yeah.
Well, mission accomplished.
Thanks very much for your time and insight today on the show.
Everybody, that's Christopher Ketchum, freelance reporter and writer for many venues, antiwar.com, Harper's, GQ, The Nation, Salon, Mother Jones, Men's Journal, Good Magazine, Radar, National Geographic and the American Conservative.
He's got one there now at amconmag.com, The Anthrax Files.
Thanks again very much for your time today, Chris.
All right.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
