08/19/08 – Glenn Greenwald – The Scott Horton Show

Alright folks, you all know this guy, it's Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com, Salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald, he's a former constitutional law litigator and a journalist and blogger.
He's the author of the books How Would a Patriot Act, A Tragic Legacy, and Great American Hypocrite, and he's been keeping close track on the FBI's disclosures, so-called, in the Anthrax case and the media's coverage of those so-called disclosures.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
Great to be back, Scott.
Thanks.
It's good to have you here.
Now, well, case closed and it's time for the Olympics, and this was a few news cycles ago and we're done with this Anthrax thing.
That one dead guy did it, right?
Well, it is amazing.
I mean, it got a lot of attention for, you know, maybe 24, 48 hours, maybe a few days longer in the wake of Bruce Ivan's rather melodramatic suicide, and that's about as long as journalists seem capable of sustaining interest in any one issue, notwithstanding the fact that all of the questions remain unanswered, all of the mysteries are still shrouded in secrecy, and the story is as important as ever.
I think government agencies know that if they just wait out the questions for a long enough time, which isn't very long at all, maybe a matter of a few days, then the questions just go away and we move on to, as you say, the Olympics, or who's the vice presidential pick, or all the other exciting diversions, and the questions just are left unexamined.
Well, the headline in the New York Times today, on one hand it says, hey, FBI presents Anthrax evidence, so it ought to be good enough for you, but then it even says right there in the headline that the FBI says that they can't erase, quote, doubts, and here I thought that that was the standard for conviction.
So they're saying that if you people were a jury, we would not be able to convict this guy is the headline of the freaking article.
And then in paragraph two, it says that if you don't believe everything they say, then you're with the spore on the grassy knoll and a conspiracy nut.
Right.
I mean, in lieu of offering any actual substantive explanations, or more importantly, in lieu of revealing the evidence that the FBI is in possession of, exclusive possession of, they've resorted right away to the standard demonization tactics, that if you don't believe everything the government says, then it essentially means that you say you're a conspiracy nut.
I mean, the assistant director of the FBI was quoted, it was obviously a planned comment designed to do just that, in every newspaper saying, well, there are always going to be people who are talking about the spore and the grassy knoll, designed to depict those of us who haven't been convinced by the FBI's nondisclosure of their evidence, as just basically being insatiable anti-government nuts.
And interestingly, of course, the media depicts it the same way.
There was an article that I highlighted yesterday from the Associated Press, which wrote about the skeptics of the FBI's case, and the article, the AP article that appeared in hundreds of newspapers across the country, it acknowledged the fact that there were some very legitimate questions, including ones that have been meticulously researched and that are grounded in science.
And it talked about many people who have offered those kinds of questions, and listed me and several other people as ones who have, and yet laced the entire article with references to things like, you know, you can't prove that aliens didn't mail anthrax, and it talked about how, you know, anti-Semites are speculating on the internet that it was the Jews who did it.
And, you know, talking about how this has all the elements of an exciting film of conspiracy theory.
But again, acclaiming, as the FBI did, and as the media always does, the refusal to believe everything the government says without first seeing the proof, almost with a sort of, you know, insanity, or just, you know, it automatically places you on the fringe if you question what the government says.
And I mean, it's in general that that is an extremely unhealthy attitude.
But here's a case where the FBI, by its own reckoning, for years insisted that they had this right suspect, Stephen Hadfield, only to have to pay him close to six million dollars because they destroyed his life, and it turned out that they were wrong.
Before that, the government was insisting it was Iraq who was behind it, or Al-Qaeda who was behind it.
So in this particular case, never mind all the other instances in general of government deceit and error, in this particular case, there is a history that they got everything wrong.
They now accuse someone who's dead and can't defend himself, and they refuse to reveal the evidence.
The only thing that would be insane would be to believe the government without demanding further proof, and yet our media and government in concert trying to depict those who ask questions as somehow being crazed or radical or even, you know, sort of mentally unstable.
Well, you know, this Times article is the same as that AP article, where here they quote Richard O. Spurzel, a retired microbiologist who led the United Nations Biological Weapons Inspections of Iraq, saying he remains skeptical.
That's a pretty tenuous argument, he says.
This is the grassy knoll conspiracy theories.
And at the same time, what we have really here is simply a matter of projection.
I'm actually pretty good at conspiracy theories myself, and I recognize conspiracy theory when I see one.
And in this case, the FBI has conspiracy theory about this guy, and their logic is all backwards.
It's all speculation.
It's all, let's see if we can come up with a case to make it seem convincing that this was the guy who did it.
It's not simply about solving the crime.
And we can see by their leaps to conclusions and their taking speculation as fact who the conspiracy kooks are in this case.
It's the FBI, Glenn.
No, I mean, you know, you're absolutely right.
I mean, one of the things that, you know, was so striking to me, and the point that you made at the beginning was quite smart.
I mean, you know, two weeks ago, the FBI stood up at a news conference and accused Bruce Ivins not only of being the anthrax attacker, but having acted alone and said that they could easily prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, and even said that they were eager to have done so and regret the fact that when he died, they lost the opportunity.
And yet, here they are, as you say, acknowledging that there are doubts that pervade this case that they're never going to be able to resolve.
There are doubts scientifically in their case, there are doubts in terms of the circumstantial evidence.
And I'll just give you one example that was so striking to me, which was, you know, a week ago, one of the principal criticisms of the FBI's case is that there is absolutely no evidence, at least that they've revealed or described, that places Bruce Ivins at what is, in essence, the scene of the crime, which are the mailboxes in New Jersey and Princeton, New Jersey, that the FBI says is where the anthrax letters are sent.
I mean, he lives in Maryland, he works in Maryland, and so in order to build a case, one of the very first things you would want to do is to have evidence linking him in some way to those New Jersey mailboxes, witnesses who saw him there, a record trail that he went there, out of the ordinary activity of filling your gas tank up or using credit cards or ATM withdrawals, out of the ordinary that would suggest that he actually traveled there.
There's absolutely nothing like that.
And so what the FBI tried to do in order to compensate for that deficiency is they leaked to the media about a week ago this claim that Bruce Ivins had taken administrative leave from work on the morning of September 17, the day before the first batch of anthrax letters were sent, and that he returned to the office only late in the day at 4 or 5 p.m. for a meeting.
And they told the media, leaked to the media, that they believe that he, after taking administrative leave in the morning, drove up to New Jersey to drop the anthrax letters off and returned to Maryland in time for that afternoon meeting.
They didn't have any proof of that.
They said that was their belief as to what happened.
Now, several people immediately online, of course, no journalists, but several people immediately online pointed out that the FBI's claim would be physically impossible because by their own reckoning, the FBI said that the window of opportunity to have dropped these anthrax letters in the mail began at 5 p.m. that day on September 17 because it would have to be after 5 p.m. in order for it to bear the postmark that it bore, which was September 18.
So there'd be no way that he could have driven up to New Jersey, dropped the letters in the mailbox, and returned for a 5 o'clock meeting in Maryland because that would mean that he would have dropped the letters before 5 o'clock, not after, which by the FBI's own claims would have made it impossible.
People pointed that out.
And so two days ago, the Post printed a new leak without even acknowledging that it was a new story.
And the FBI said, actually, what we believe is that he drove up to New Jersey after work that night on the 17th.
So they don't even, despite standing up two weeks ago and proclaiming with all this confidence that they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Bruce Ivins was the anthrax attacker and that he acted alone, they don't even have any idea how it is that he got to the mailbox, when it is that he got to the mailbox, or even if he got to the mailbox.
And all they do when you point out the huge holes in their case is they just change their story to some new version, hardly a hallmark of something that would warrant confidence in a criminal investigation or in government accusations.
So here you are, not just putting all of the rest of the mass media in this country to shame, but the FBI, too, they might as well deputize you and let you solve this thing at this point.
Well, I think it's, you know, fairly clear that they actually don't want to solve.
They're not that interested in actually solving the case.
What they're interested in is creating the perception that the case has been solved.
For who knows what reason, I mean, in general, law enforcement agencies are under pressure in a case like this to solve the case.
When it's a case of this magnitude, one that has gone unsolved for so many years, that had such political significance, where they accused the wrong person for years and had to pay $6 million, the pressure is, you know, enormous on them to solve the case.
And essentially, you know, their behavior was not the behavior of an agency that believed they had a case.
I mean, they basically tried to, you know, bully and intimidate Bruce Ivins and his family into breaking, because they didn't have a case against him.
So they wanted to break him to see if they could make him confess exactly what they did to Steven Hadsall.
They didn't arrest him.
They didn't detain him.
They didn't announce that he was guilty.
They didn't have a case.
It was only once he was dead that they suddenly proclaimed, knowing that he couldn't defend himself, oh, this is definitely the guy, he's the sole anthrax attacker, case closed.
And now the question is, you know, are there going to be any members of Congress who have the ability and the will to demand answers of the FBI?
Because if the answer to that is no, then this will just join the whole other, you know, litany of episodes over the last seven years, where our government has done things in utter secrecy, probably quite illegal, potentially, you know, corrupting the extreme, and yet is able to conceal all those actions because there's no institution strong enough or willing enough to dig in and expose it.
Yeah, I think that's very well said.
I want to focus on one more technical aspect of this, and I'm no scientist, and I know you're not either, but this, I don't know, seems pretty ironic and stands right out in this New York Times article this morning, that the FBI is saying that, well, there's this objection that, yeah, but how could this guy, Ivins, have weaponized the anthrax and coated it with this silica so that it floats around in the air and all this?
And the FBI is saying, ah, well, he wouldn't have had to because we've determined that anthrax just grows silica in nature, and it works great like this, but sorry, we've been completely unable to reproduce that effect anywhere.
And they quote one scientist here, Dr. Spurzel, again, saying this raises even more questions.
If the FBI is right, he says, and an individual can make that kind of product just by drying it, we are in deep trouble as a nation and a world.
Anybody can weaponize anthrax in their living room, according to the FBI, apparently.
This is one of the true mysteries of this case.
If you go back and look at what the FBI was saying in 2002 and 2003, and not just the FBI, but outside scientists whom they recruited to examine the anthrax, there was unanimity that this was a very frightening form of anthrax because it had at least been aerosolized, if not weaponized, meaning it would float.
You don't have to do anything to it in order for it to become inhalation anthrax.
It existed in the form in the letter, and that's how it killed people who didn't even open the letter.
It essentially penetrated through the envelope and into people's lungs, deep into their lungs, which is extremely difficult to do, said the FBI, and takes a lot of know-how and complexity.
And in fact, the FBI, and I can show you the article, it's from 2004 in USA Today, said that they were trying for years to reproduce the anthrax, to reverse engineer it, and they were incapable of doing so.
Now suddenly they claim that they have been able to reverse engineer the anthrax, and that actually is quite easy to do, although as you say, they say, well, we weren't able to create it with the silica, we're not sure how that happened, somehow, when the anthrax attacker did it, the silica just naturally absorbed into the spores by nature, that's natural, even though we can't get that to happen no matter how hard we try, but we have been able to reverse engineer it, and there's nothing really that exotic about it, it's not really that uncommon, you wouldn't need such a high level of skill in order to do it.
Remember, Bruce Ivins is not someone who ever worked in weaponization, he's somebody who worked in research, and they used essentially wet spores at Fort Detrick, and not the kind of dry spores that was found in these letters, and certainly not the highly refined spores that were in the letters sent to Daschle and Leihe, and you have people at Fort Detrick saying there is no way that Bruce Ivins could have produced these spores based on his knowledge without working with other people and without being detected, and yet the FBI is just waving those objections away, saying things that completely contradict what they've said in the past, namely, oh, we were able to reproduce this, and it wasn't coated with silica, it just had silica naturally in it, and yet this whole field of microbiologists, ones who worked at Fort Detrick, ones who know Bruce Ivins, ones who are in the field, who are saying it's extremely improbable that he would have had the know-how, let alone the access to the technology to do this at all, let alone to do it undetected, and so that was what the FBI was purporting to respond to, was to say, oh, no, look, we have scientific data that will convince even scientists that we were able to trace it back to him and to prove that he did it, and yet what they released was so inconclusive that people are saying almost unanimously that there was really nothing new there that in order to really know there would have to be months and months and months of peer-review scientific study in order to determine whether or not the FBI's case is even convincing, let alone conclusive, so the more you learn about the FBI's case, the more doubts, the more questions that are raised, not by me, not by a few cranks on the internet, but by establishment scientists who have no vested interest one way or the other.
They're members of the government, private, public, microbiological sprawling industry, and they're simply saying as scientists that the FBI's claims make very little sense.
Well, that's because they're lying, Glenn.
Alright, now listen, I know that I have you for a short time today, so let me just thank you very briefly for mentioning the proxy war in Somalia in your most recent blog entry there at salon.com slash opinion slash green wall, but my last question for you is about the accountability now strange bedfellows project, the realignment between real libertarians and real Bill of Rights Karen liberals and conservatives against the war party and the total surveillance state there.
You know, one thing that I thought was really interesting, there's always things every week that illustrate that realignment, and we've talked about it many times before.
Of course, we just formed a coalition and did a very successful money bomb with the people behind the Ron Paul campaign around civil liberties issues and constitutional rights and limited government and anti-war, that the right, the Ron Paul libertarian right and sort of paleo conservatives and a lot of progressives are in complete agreement on.
And those are pretty broad issues to be in complete agreement on.
They're not, you know, just sort of isolated, discrete issues there.
There are large scale, fundamental disputes that we as a country are having, and the libertarian right and progressives are on the same page, and we've raised, you know, over $500,000 around this issue and just did a money bomb that's, you know, close to $175,000.
But if you look at, for example, one of the most cited interviews of the last month, it's probably among liberal blogs, it's probably Andrew Bacevich, who was on Bill Moyers several days ago, who's, you know, a longtime conservative, a former colonel in the military, just a standard paleo conservative who was talking about the excesses of executive power, and the dangers of imperialism.
Isn't that a great interview?
Yeah, it was, it was, it was a superb interview.
And yet what was so striking about it was that it was mostly liberal sites that, you know, and libertarian sites praised it, you know, to the sky.
And he's hardly in any way a liberal, and yet on, and I think that's what this realignment, the fact that he, you know, what he says, his world view is something that resonates very deeply with standard progressive.
Yep.
Let's hope that in the Obama years that the really principled people on the left will be shaken out and will join us in the new realignment and not be caught up too much in their hero worship of the new guy, same as the old guy.
Yeah, you know, I think you've seen that over the past couple of months, you know, with people becoming increasingly disenchanted with Obama and with the campaign, clearly, you know, the rose-colored glasses have fallen off all but the most, you know, zealous dead enders in terms of what Obama really is.
And you see it in terms of his vice presidential picks, I mean, the roster is pretty much chock full of people who support this sort of, you know, war party and that mentality.
So I think that there will be principled opposition that endures on the left, even if a democratic president, and we don't know what Obama will do, but if a democratic president gets into office and starts pursuing these same policies.
Yeah.
Well, I'll support him when he does the right stuff, but, you know, I'm not holding my breath waiting for that kind of thing.
And let's see, I had one more great question for you, Glenn, but I don't remember what it was.
Oh, yeah, I do.
It's sitting here right in front of me.
Do you mind if I pirate your radio show over my pirate radio show and play your interview of Mort Halperin right here after we get off the air?
No, I don't mind.
You can go ahead and do that.
I'm happy to have that play.
I think the quality ended up actually being reasonably good on that.
So that should work.
I'll probably be writing about that as well.
He had a few of his friends defend him in the past several days and say things like shame on me for questioning the motives of such a distinguished and important figure.
You see the democratic establishment has their own, you know, hierarchies and sense of aristocratic entitlement.
But, you know, if you're going to come out and write an op-ed in the New York Times as he did defending the Bush-Cheney surveillance bill, you need to expect that you're going to be criticized and have your behavior attacked.
And that's what I did.
Yeah, well, good for you.
You know, it's always the stuff that you should be most proud of that people say shame on you for, Glenn.
It seems like.
Yes.
Well, I mean, it's kind of absurd.
I mean, you know, and there are arguments where I know Mort Halperin and, you know, he's a great man, which he may or may not be.
But whatever else is true, his behavior in this case was quite bizarre and ultimately appalling.
So, you know, there's no reason to refrain from saying that.
Cool.
Well, I'm glad that I have this opportunity to once again point my audience toward your blog and your new radio show.
It's at salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And you can find Glenn's radio show right there in the upper right hand corner.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Glenn.
Appreciate it.
Always a pleasure, Scott.