08/05/08 – Glenn Greenwald – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And in introducing today's guest, I need to start with an apology.
I interviewed Glenn Greenwald, I think last Thursday, and the dang computers ate the interview.
Believe me, I even had my computer genius friend go back digging through the raw zeros and ones trying to find the temp files on the darn thing.
It's gone.
Gone, I tells you.
And I'm really sorry about that.
For those of you who heard it live, you know it was a great one and certainly worth saving.
But these things happen, and now we're going to make up for it by talking with Glenn on an entirely different topic.
Very happy to introduce and welcome back to the show, Glenn Greenwald.
He's the author of How Would a Patriot Act?
A Tragic Legacy and Great American Hypocrites.
He's a blogger, a legal affairs blogger, and a former litigator, a legal affairs blogger at Salon.com.
The address is Salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
And he's also the host of the brand new Glenn Greenwald Show at Salon Radio.
Welcome back to the show, Glenn.
It's great to be back, Scott.
Thanks.
Well, I'm really happy to have you here.
And well, for the people who didn't get a chance to hear the show live last week or even this week, and maybe they'll be listening to this on MP3 later, let's tell them a little bit about your new radio show.
I have to tell you, it's so good.
And in listening to your interview last Friday with the guy from the ACLU, I have to tell you, you're making me nervous, man.
Yeah, it's a competition.
I told you when I started that I was looking to follow in your foot tracks.
But yeah, it's basically Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the moment.
It's typically taped interviews of about 20 to 30 minutes, posted at Salon.com.
And it really was devised to kind of be a supplement to the writing that I do so that I can interview people who are experts in whatever it is I'm writing about.
Or often, if I'm critical of a political figure or journalist, I tend to invite them on in order to hash out whatever issues there are, and just a way of kind of expanding the coverage that I'm able to give to particular issues.
Well, let's see, you've got, what, four or five of them under your belt so far, right?
Yeah, still a novice, but each one, you know, practice makes perfect.
So hopefully that's the cliché that can guide me.
Oh yeah, well, no, I mean, you're absolutely great.
And for example, the one with the ACLU guy from last week, I'm sorry, I forgot his name, Ben something?
Ben Weisner, yeah.
Ben Weisner.
Well, because you're a lawyer and you know these issues so well, the questions you ask are just, you know, absolutely on point, and did even a better job than I did interviewing Warren Ritchie from the Christian Science Monitor about Gitmo last Friday, so that means a lot.
No, I'm just kidding.
All right, that's the ultimate compliment.
Oh yeah, right, okay.
So anyway, listen, I'm really glad I have you on the show today.
This anthrax case, I covered it yesterday on the show, and went through, you know, all the different things, notes I'd taken and important points worth making, and I sort of felt at the end I didn't have really a narrative to sell anybody, really a story with a beginning, middle, and end, unless it's simply that you just can't believe what the FBI says.
But I was wondering if I can use that brain of yours to help explain to the audience here exactly what is the story with the FBI now pinning the anthrax attacks of 2001 on this now-dead scientist Bruce Ivins?
We don't know what the story is, and I think that's the most important point.
I mean, obviously the Justice Department and FBI specifically are doing what they always do, which is they selectively leak information to stupid reporters whom they know will uncritically print whatever it is that they tell them without any scrutiny.
And so what you see now is basically the standard media circus that, you know, back in 2001 blamed the anthrax attacks on Saddam Hussein in Iraq when that's what they were being fed, and then essentially convicted in public a person who, at least according to the government, is completely innocent, and that's Stephen Hatfield, who is a bioweapons scientist at Fort Detrick, whose life and reputation they absolutely destroyed by purposely depicting as the guilty party, only to then pay him to settle a case three weeks ago, a total of $5 million.
And now suddenly you're seeing all sorts of claims that there's convincing evidence within the possession of the FBI that Bruce Ivins was actually not just the anthrax attacker, but the one who perpetrated those attacks alone.
And what's missing from any of the media accounts, although there's been some leaks in the last couple days, is any shred of evidence whatsoever that would suggest that he was actually the anthrax attacker.
We've seen some circumstantial claims being made that would link him in some way, but nothing of the type of evidence that any rational citizen ought to require before even remotely assuming that what the FBI here is saying is true.
And the last thing I would underscore is, you know, this is not just a run-of-the-mill, garden-variety crime that we ought to want solved, although obviously it is that.
You want to know that whoever murdered five people and put the country into such fear for those weeks has really been apprehended and identified.
But it was a truly momentous, really a truly tumultuous episode that really served to put the country into a much higher state of fear than it would have otherwise been.
And it opened up, you know, all sorts of policies and positions on the part of the government that would have otherwise been impossible.
It was the first lethal bioterror attack ever in United States history.
According to our own government, it was perpetrated by the United States government facility, by a top researcher at a U.S. Army lab.
The political significance and the implications is extraordinary.
The incentive for the government to lie about what happened here is immense.
And so, you know, I would think that the country would demand, and I would think the government would want, a full-scale investigation so that all these lurking questions can finally be put to rest.
All right.
Now, there's a lot of stuff to go on there, but I want to focus on the importance of this in the public mind that you hit on there.
You had a great quote from Richard Cohen, a columnist from the Washington Post, where he explained the linkage in his mind that, well, somebody said Iraq and anthrax after this thing, which I took real personally and scared the hell out of me.
And from that point, that was how I decided I supported the war with Iraq.
And then from there, man, it would have been almost impossible to get me to back down from that position, even as all the links between these things seem to get thinner and thinner.
You know, I use that as an illustrative example.
I don't think he was by any means uncommon.
It's difficult to remember now because it was so long ago.
And what's so bizarre about it is the anthrax attacks have been basically flushed, you know, out of our public discussion.
I mean, you hear people all the time, even, you know, political figures and media figures saying things like, well, thankfully, there's been no terrorism attacks since 9-11.
And of course, that's just not true.
The anthrax attacks were a terrorist attack on U.S. soil after 9-11, but it's been so deleted from our history that people actually forget that it even happened.
And yet, if you go back and look at the impact that it had, it's really hard to overstate.
I mean, the letters that accompanied the anthrax were deliberately written to link them to Islamic radicalism.
And the 9-11 attacks, they were dated 9-11.
They said, you know, we have anthrax, you die now, death to America, death to Israel, Allah is great.
So there was a clear intent on the part of the attackers to depict in the public mind the connection between the anthrax attacks and the same, you know, people who had perpetrated the 9-11 attacks.
I think more importantly, though, is the 9-11 attacks, you know, were sort of spectacular.
But had they not been followed up very quickly by the anthrax attacks, I think the fear levels would have been contained, in part because they were aimed at, you know, high population centers in New York and Washington, at the Pentagon, the Congress, and the World Trade Center.
And so people who lived in the heartland could sort of distance themselves from it.
The anthrax attacks, by contrast, you know, killed people just to happen to encounter them through the mail, something that every single American interacts with on a daily basis.
Beyond that, you know, the anthrax was sent directly into the heart of our most elite political and media institutions.
I mean, they were aimed at the Senate Majority Leader and the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee and America's, you know, best-known news anchor and Tom Brokaw at NBC News and other media outlets as well.
So it really created the sense that our social institutions and our social order was being threatened and that anything was basically possible at that point, things that could threaten your security that you would never even have anticipated, but that you had no defense against.
And it created this real sense of collective helplessness that really compounded the fear levels that the 9-11 attacks had created, and I would suggest elevated those fear levels significantly.
I mean, U.S. Postal Services around the country were shut down.
Congress was shut down.
You know, they had constant pictures of people in, you know, bioweapons uniforms cleansing public buildings and talk about whether or not the White House mail system had been infected.
And nobody knew what level of anthrax we were dealing with or, you know, there was talk of aerosolizing it and being able to spray it over large metropolitan cities and kill hundreds of thousands of people.
So the psychological impact of those attacks were profound.
And the fact that, you know, seven years later, it's far from clear that we know who did it, but that the government itself is saying it came from the government is really remarkable, if you think about it.
Well, and they have been saying it came from the government really all this time, even when they were accusing Hatfield, right?
I mean, I remember back, and I don't even know how really important or relevant this is or, you know, to other information that's already established it.
But it was in the Austin American-Statesman back then, I think in probably 2002, maybe early 2002, where a rancher said, oh, yeah, this is my anthrax.
I found a cow dead.
I threw it in the back of the truck, took it to Texas A&M.
And then the reporter went to Texas A&M and talked to them.
And they had sent it off to Fort Detrick Laboratory.
That was the origin of this strain of anthrax.
And that was publicly, you know, part of the story from the beginning.
Well, this is what is so interesting.
I actually just interviewed for my radio show and posted Congressman Rush Holt, who he was personally, you know, affected as a congressman because his district in Central New Jersey was apparently where at least some of the anthrax letters were sent, the mailboxes that were sent.
Postal offices in his district were contaminated and closed.
His office was one of the few on Capitol Hill where they found traces of anthrax and had to close it and decontaminate it.
In addition, he's a physicist by training.
He's a scientist.
That's what he did before he went to Congress.
And he also happens to be the chairman of the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel that is charged with overseeing intelligence investigations, which the anthrax investigation is classified as being.
So he's a very important person in the Congress and a very knowledgeable one at that as well.
And what he just told me was that from the beginning, he was able to observe the investigative process.
And it was inept in the extreme.
I mean, there were, you know, obvious avenues of investigation that were left unexamined for many, many months at a time.
There were all sorts of incidents.
The FBI gave their consent to Iowa State University to destroy a whole bunch of strains of the Ames strain of anthrax, which is the strain that was used in these letters, things that you would never do.
And then they ended up obsessed on to the exclusion of virtually every other possibility.
Stephen Haspel for years, who vehemently insisted on his innocence and sued everyone in order to prove it.
And so the investigation from the start, just to be generous, was driven by extreme ineptitude of the type that was almost guaranteed to turn their attention away from the true source of the anthrax attacks.
And, you know, whether that was done deliberately or just through, you know, common ineptitude, it happened.
And that's why no person who's at all rational would think that the FBI has now found the killer.
Right.
Yeah, that's the funny thing about the FBI.
It seems like their whole method of logic is all back ass words where they just decide, all right, here's the hypothesis.
And they're like conspiracy kooks.
Look, we're pretty sure that Richard Jewell set off this bomb just so that he could tell people to get away from it and look like a hero.
Don't you think, Dan?
Yeah, I think so, too, Dave.
And then that's it.
Yeah, and then that's the only thing in which they focus and they ignore all evidence that conflicts with it.
And they interpret all evidence to be consistent with it.
That's exactly what Congressman Holton just said about how they have conducted themselves in the anthrax case.
And he mentioned the Richard Jewell case as well to suggest that this is par for the course on the part of the FBI.
And, you know, again, you're fighting here with the highest profile cases.
I mean, the anthrax attacks, you know, there couldn't have been a higher priority of the FBI than finding the anthrax killer.
And yet the way in which they went about it almost seemed as though it was designed to ensure that the actual perpetrators were never apprehended.
I mean, there are all sorts of, you know, still unresolved questions.
I mean, there's a matter of a letter that was sent to FBI headquarters after the anthrax letters were sent, but before they were publicized or before they even arrived, blaming an Egyptian scientist at Fort Detrick.
He was no longer at Fort Detrick, but he used to be, calling him a potential biological terrorist, basically displaying extreme knowledge about what the work he did at Fort Detrick was, who he was, almost clearly somebody who would have had to have been at Fort Detrick to have written this anonymous letter, accusing him of being a biological terrorist right before the anthrax attacks began.
And he was basically driven away out of Fort Detrick by a cadre of government scientists who constantly expressed anti-Arab hostility towards him and who had demonstrated all sorts of, you know, animus towards Muslim and Arabs for quite a long time.
Now, you know, maybe that's a coincidence that someone with a vendetta against him wanted to depict him as a terrorist to the FBI in the wake of 9-11, but the fact that they called him a biological terrorist, almost seeking to blame the anthrax attacks on him before the attacks even occurred, meaning there was whoever wrote that letter had foreknowledge of the attacks, combined with extensive knowledge of Fort Detrick, would mean that that would be a very glaring avenue of inquiry that you'd want to pursue, if he had done virtually nothing.
It doesn't even really matter whether ultimately it was this so-called Camel Club, these people who harassed this guy Assad, who were responsible for this.
No matter who it was that sent that letter, they know something, and what was it I read on your blog, the quote from the guy who said, oh, they zero-filed it, which means some bureaucrat in the FBI, deliberately or through complete incompetence or what, I guess we'll never know, decided this is an important, well, geez, it was sent before anybody even knew that the anthrax attacks had happened, so it must just be a hoax and threw it in the trash.
This is your number one clue.
Well, this is why, you know, what's so interesting about it is, you know, one of the things that Congressman Holtz has said is, well, and Tom Daschle said this on the weekend shows, and Pat Leahy has been complaining about this forever, and of course, Leahy and Daschle were the targets of the letters, that they've been completely blocked out of learning any information about what the FBI has been doing.
For years, Congressman Holtz said that they were constantly stonewalled, even when they would call the FBI investigators to the committee, to their committees, they would ask questions and they would just sit there and read them pro forma statements that were probably written by Congressman Holtz at some, you know, congressional liaison office.
So the FBI has been, you know, just contemptuous of the idea that the Congress should have any right to know what they're doing and exercise oversight, and what Congressman Holtz said as well is that, you know, obviously, the Congress has had a great deal of difficulty even trying to, with subpoenas, get information from the executive branch, and when I told him, I thought the only avenue of, you know, that would be worthwhile pursuing, what was absolutely needed, was some kind of a commission along the lines of the 9-11 Commission, an external commission that is created specifically to investigate all aspects of the impacts attacks, and is endowed with full-scale irresistible subpoena powers, so that they have the power to obtain all evidence and all government officials are compelled to respond the way they were at the 9-11 Commission, and that then there'd be a public report, you know, that is as thorough as can be, setting forth all the facts and divulging what happened, and he said he supports that.
That's the only way, and there's all kinds of reasons to think that even with that, you're not going to get anything close to a full explanation, but clearly, it's of that magnitude, and there are enough, you know, questions and errors and misguided events that have occurred that I think strongly suggest that that kind of commission is urgently needed, or else, you know, the large portion of the public will just continue to believe that the true series of events continues to be concealed.
Now, that's interesting that he agreed with that idea and said that was a good idea, and I guess you already sort of implied there that, you know, you may end up getting Philip Zelikow writing the dang report at the end, and it's maybe only the best we can do.
I was going to ask you, and I think I already know this is far-fetched, but you're actually a lawyer, so I want to make sure about this.
Other than a blue-ribbon panel or the FBI, can this case not be turned over somehow to some state police or to, oh, God, forgive me, BATF, anybody but the FBI to do this case, or this is simply their jurisdiction, period?
Yes, it's their jurisdiction.
I mean, it's an interstate crime, but that, you know, has been committed across state lines, and so the FBI has been assigned with the investigation, and, you know, at this late date, you know, no one is going to take away jurisdictional authority to investigate this crime from the FBI.
I think what's needed is an independent body to go and really scrub clean what the FBI has done from start to finish and to look at things that the FBI hasn't considered or hasn't looked at or hasn't explored in order to find out what happened.
You know, I think it should include questions about who was trying to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq early on in order to depict in the public minds that Iraq was this grave and existential threat and what role the government played in that to why they pursued Stephen Haspel to the exclusion of all else through all of these clues that they seem to have been very uninterested in and following up on and the destruction of other information and evidence that is forever lost.
So, you know, it would be a really thorough and comprehensive scope of inquiry that is needed.
Well, tell us a little bit about the linking of the anthrax attack to Iraq.
I have to say I was just shocked to see, not surprised, shocked though, to see the footage of John McCain on the David Letterman show within days, correct, of the attack saying that Iraq may have been behind this.
Yeah, what's really bizarre about that was that actually occurred almost a week before even the ABC story that I've written a lot about was broadcast where they said that test performed at Fort Detrick to discover the presence of bentonite in the anthrax.
That was a hallmark of the Iraqi biological weapons program, a totally fictitious fabricated report clearly fed to ABC by people who wanted to link the attacks to Iraq in the public mind.
But even a week before that, almost a week before, McCain, as you say, was on a David Letterman show and out of the blue, I mean, completely unprovoked, he was asked actually by Letterman about how things were going in Afghanistan.
And after he said how great things were going, he then volunteered that a, quote, second phase of this very well might include Iraq because there are indications, as he put it, that Iraq might be responsible for the anthrax attacks and then added, you know, rather threateningly, gravely, that if that turns out to be the case, some tough decisions are going to have to be made.
And then three days later, he and Joe Lieberman both went on Meet the Press and vehemently argued that Iraq would have to be targeted by our government, and that Sodom would have to be removed, and we would have to take out Iraq, as they put it.
And Lieberman was asked about anthrax and claimed that the information he had, you know, proved that there was either a huge amount of money behind it, that it was state sponsored, or that it was stolen from the Russian anthrax program, none of which apparently, at least if you believe our government now, was true.
And so the question then becomes who was giving them that information?
What information did they have?
That allowed them to go on national television and make these extraordinarily, extraordinarily inflammatory claims about anthrax that turned out to be totally false.
You bring this up on your blog.
I don't want to ask you to speculate too much.
You know, answer it however you like.
But it sure is strange, isn't it, that the guys in the White House were eating Cipro pills before the anthrax thing even started?
Yeah, not only were the people in the White House eating Cipro before the anthrax started, but, you know, everybody basically in the know, you know, all the on-time journalists and all of those people connected into the Beltway power system were all popping Cipro back then, way before the anthrax attacks were publicized or had occurred.
Now, you know, there may be an innocent explanation for that, which is, well, they had intelligence reports that, you know, al-Qaeda had been planning anthrax attacks, or that Iraq or other Middle Eastern enemies might have been threatening them, or that it's just a precaution that the government had already, with pre-existing plans, had decided people should take in the event of a high-level terrorist threat.
That's all possible.
Or it's possible that, you know, again, given that the anthrax attacks came from the government by their own account, the fact that the government itself decided they were going to quietly take Cipro in order to shield themselves from anthrax before the attacks occurred, begs the, you know, to burning query as to, you know, why was it that on the night of September 11th, Dick Cheney and his office were given Cipro on their way out the White House door to Camp David, where they were, you know, being shuttled off to for safety?
And who were, you know, Richard Cohen, going back to him, wrote a column saying that he was told by a, quote, high-level government source that he ought to carry around Cipro with him.
Who told him that, and what was the basis?
Now, you know, you don't have to be conspiratorial about it.
You can just say, and I think, you know, any rational person would agree that that question deserves answers.
And maybe the answers are very innocuous.
Maybe, you know, our government was exerting an excess of caution, or the right amount of caution, and had good grounds for doing so.
Or maybe, you know, the answer is less innocuous, but we at least ought to know.
Yeah.
Maybe they thought the September 11th attacks just weren't traumatic enough, and they wanted to crank it up a couple of notches.
Yeah, you just don't know.
And that's the point, is that, you know, unanswered questions of that type is exactly what breeds extreme distrust on the part of the citizenry and the government and in the media, and is the fertile ground for conspiracy theories.
When you hide information and refuse to answer questions, it's only natural that people will begin speculating about what really happened in ways that are rational and in ways that aren't.
Right.
And especially when, you know, this administration has been so overtly manipulative.
I remember I laughed at them.
I shouldn't have.
I should have taken it more seriously at the time.
But I remember seeing the picture in Newsweek of the extremely concerned, all very professional class looking East Coast, Washington, D.C. type people in the Home Depot with their arms full of duct tape and plastic sheeting as the Bush administration was threatening that Saddam Hussein was going to fly his balsa wooden string remote control planes across Jordan, Israel, the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and spray them with anthrax on the East Coast.
But people really were scared of that.
I thought it was the silliest thing I'd ever heard.
But people really were traumatized by that kind of thing.
I don't know if this is actually true, but I believe one guy actually suffocated himself by wrapping his house in so much plastic that he died of it.
Yeah, I haven't heard that.
But, you know, the reason why, you know, I had written earlier this week that I thought the anthrax attacks were, you know, the second most consequential event of the Bush presidency after 9-11 attacks and arguably even more consequential.
And, you know, whether one wants to agree with that or not, what is clearly the case is that all of the controversial government policies of the last seven years that we've been endlessly debating, from the attack on Iraq to warrantless eavesdropping to the use of torture to secret prisons to the acquisition of unlimited executive power, all is grounded in the extreme levels of fear that the population was in in the wake of the 9-11 and anthrax attacks.
I mean, everything grows out of that.
And so whatever else you want to say, there's just no denying that the level of fear that these attacks were able to create in the minds of the public, justifiably or not, was of unparalleled significance in everything that happened in our country and in the world for the many years after that.
And so, for me, the one intolerable result of all that is to have a situation where all of those matters are anything other than thoroughly and satisfactorily investigated.
And, you know, it really doesn't take a conspiracy theorist at all.
Robert Higgs has a great book called Crisis and Leviathan, which just simply shows that every time there's a crisis, he calls it the ratchet effect.
Government gets bigger, more powerful, more centralized, rights get fewer, more narrowly defined, and it never quite goes back to the way it was before the crisis.
Yeah, I don't think that's a controversial proposition that, you know, in times of high levels of fear and threat, people seek out greater protection, and that means greater protection from the government.
And the way you seek out greater protection from the government is by giving it more power and relinquishing more of your rights.
And, you know, that formula is universal.
And as you suggest, the government, by its nature, once it acquires additional power, gives it up very slowly, if at all.
And so, you know, the idea that a political leader would want its population to be in fear is something that I would say most political scientists would, you know, readily accept without much debate.
Well, after all, I mean, they are ultimately our security force.
Their entire basis is in fear of what might happen if they weren't around to protect us.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, the more fearful you are, the more you need them, the more power you're willing to give them, the less scrutiny you're going to demand of them, and the fewer rights you're going to demand for yourself.
I mean, that's just a basic, you know, formula of how human nature works.
All right, everybody.
It's Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com.
And your blog entry this morning is the FBI's emerging leaking case against Ivins.
And I think it may very well be established in many people's minds, Glenn, that, well, this guy was some kind of weirdo and some kind of murderous psycho.
And I'm not exactly sure, but I heard that he was up to no good and that it was probably him, right, and that kind of thing.
And I really like your focus on the media coverage of this, not just what they're saying, but the content of what they're saying, but the fact that they're saying it and how they're saying it and what they're saying and how they correct themselves and all these media criticisms that I really enjoy.
So could you please share with us, I guess, some of these leaks that seem to be pretty frivolous.
They sound very shocking on their face.
Something's terribly wrong with this guy.
But when you examine some of the accusations against him, such as his state of mind, his secret PO box and his obsession with these sorority girls and all these things, it turns out to really be a lot of smoke and not much fire.
Yeah, I mean, that's what the government is obviously trying to do.
And that, to me, suggests that they don't have a lot of confidence in their actual case.
I mean, they're trying hard to turn him into this creepy psychotic, you know, way ahead of time before they are able to show their evidence that in the public mind there's already a pre-assumed conception of him.
There's something, as you say, just very wrong with him.
On some level, you know, there's this notion that even if he's been wrongfully accused, he really cares.
Good riddance.
He was, you know, some creepy weirdo.
And, you know, just to, you know, the illustrative example that I use is yesterday I saw an AP report that was very aggressive in its reporting.
They were all excited they had been given an exclusive leak by the FBI that supposedly, you know, one of the questions here is if the anthrax that was mailed from Central New Jersey, as I indicated earlier, that it was, why was Bruce Ivins, who lives in Maryland and works in Maryland, in Central New Jersey?
And is there any evidence linking him to or putting him in Central New Jersey during this time?
And this leak was designed to answer that.
It said that he had this decades-long obsession with a sorority and that this sorority was only 100 yards away from the mailbox in Central New Jersey where the anthrax letter was sent.
Implying that that meant that he had some connection to, you know, the mailbox because he was lurking and stalking the sorority and then just somehow dropped the anthrax letter off right where near the sorority was located.
Well, that, you know, that's a ridiculous claim and laughable on its face, the idea that a case could be built on something that tenuous.
But, you know, it's worth noting if that's really true.
But then the AP, an hour after they published that initial article, published an updated one, and it turns out that actually there is no sorority.
That's the Princeton campus.
There is no sorority house on that campus.
There's no place where the sorority girls, you know, congregate or live.
There's no standard sorority house.
That what actually is 100 yards away from the mailbox is not the sorority itself, but just some storage space that the sorority uses to keep, you know, their rush materials and their initiation products and flyers and the like.
I mean, it would be impossible for anyone to even know that.
And even if you were obsessed with the sorority, the idea that you would be hanging out or, you know, working by their storage space, I mean, that's utterly absurd, the fact that that would be a link to, you know, putting Bruce Ivins, giving him a reason to be in New Jersey.
And in fact, the AP updated story said, you know, quoted the legal advisor to the sorority as saying that as far as they know, none of the sorority members know of him or had any involvement with him, that they don't have any indication at all that, you know, he interacted with them in any way, shape or form.
And so the already ridiculous leak became even more ridiculous.
And then this morning on the New York Times, it got even more ridiculous still because they said that his quote unquote obsession with the sorority manifested by his having visited several chapters, the last time being in 1981.
I mean, when he was in his 30s, early 30s in Virginia and Maryland near where he lives.
And, you know, the idea that a male in his 30s would visit a sorority on several occasions is hardly, you know, I mean, you could criticize them, I guess, but it's hardly anything overwhelmingly unusual.
And the idea that that somehow constitutes a clue linking him to the anthrax attacks is just utterly stupid.
But, you know, the leak was designed and probably worked to create in the public's mind this image of him that he's this, you know, pervert and weirdo lurking outside of sorority houses for decades.
Linking him to the anthrax mailbox.
And in less than 24 hours, the truth got revealed and it turned out to be less than idiotic.
And that's how this process works is when the FBI leaks that way, they can do so in an unaccountable way that's designed to create a one sided and often false impression in the public mind of someone's guilt.
And that's what they're doing here.
Well, you know, I saw the well, I guess I heard the audio because it was just on the telephone, but it was the brother of Ivan's calling in on Fox News.
Did you see that?
I didn't.
OK, well, I'll have to send you the link.
But they're trying to get him to say the only real question they're asking is you've said on the record that you're not surprised that your brother would do this.
Tell us why it is you're not surprised.
He'd been I'm sure you saw in the paper quoted as saying, oh, I sang like a canary.
I'm sure he did it.
He's a evil guy and all that kind of thing.
Well, his absolute, complete, just stumbling incoherence makes me sound eloquent or something is ridiculous.
And he ends up going off on this tangent about how Richard Nixon thought he was above the law, too.
And that's how my brother is like Richard Nixon and just nonsense.
And they're like, all right, well, thanks anyway for for your effort.
That brother is someone who has been estranged from Bruce Ivins for 23 years.
The last time they spoke or even saw each other was in 1985.
And so the idea that he's a credible witness to talk about his brother is ludicrous.
But that was one of the very first people that then comments that they had in that initial L.A.
Times story that that reported on this story.
It was kind of got to run.
Oh, OK.
I'm sorry.
I didn't realize you're on time.
I was going to ask you about the life of the Lizer.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'll just on that, you know, I'll just quickly say that, you know, that was the Washington Post big league today.
Their big scoop was that he was in possession of this lifelizer, which which they said could be used to convert the wet spores that that were commonly used for Dietrich into the dry spores that were sent to Senator Leahy and Daschle.
And they made it seem like there'd be no reason for him to possess this device other than the fact that he would be the anthrax killer.
And yet, as it turns out, you know, there's research that he did that you can find online into anthrax vaccines in which he used this very device, a lethalizer, in order to render the anthrax usable.
And in his research, it's a very common.
I spoke with a researcher today at Harvard's Infectious Disease Institute who said that he would be shocked if somebody researching vaccines, as Bruce Ivins did, didn't use a lethalizer.
It's an extremely common device.
And so the fact that he possessed it is hardly incriminating evidence in any way.
So you're performing, you would it would be like an accountant using a pencil.
It's that common of an instrument for an anthrax researcher to use.
So that's the sort of thing that has constituted the public case against him.
And that's why I remain extremely skeptical of what we're hearing.
Yeah, it's like the case for war.
It's a hundred things that add up to nothing.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time, everybody.
That's Clint Greenwald.
He's the author of How Would a Patriot Act?
A Tragic Legacy.
Great American Hypocrites.
The blog is salon.com slash opinion slash Greenwald.
Really appreciate it.
Always a pleasure, Scott.