Without the anthrax attacks of 2001, the USA Patriot Act might never have passed.
By Dr. Kevin Barrett
Some say, “Never forget 9/11.” Others, better-informed, say, “Never forget 9/11 was an inside job.” On the 19th anniversary of America’s first biowar panic, we should be screaming from the rooftops, “Never forget the 2001 anthrax deception!”
In case you have forgotten, the anthrax affair exploded into public consciousness on Oct. 5, 2001, when tabloid journalist Bob Stevens died after inhaling ultra-weaponized anthrax he had received in the mail. On Oct. 8, more Florida tabloid journalists (at the National Enquirer) got anthrax letters. A week later Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy received their weaponized missives. Suddenly a terrorized nation was afraid to open its mail. Before it was over, 22 people, including postal workers, were sickened, and five died.
After weeks of conflicting media and government reports, it became clear that neoconservatives in government and media were lying about the anthrax. They had tried to pin the crime on Saddam Hussein, saying the anthrax was nonweaponized. But a relatively honest FBI investigation proved the anthrax was ultra-weaponized and had originated in a U.S. government lab.
Let that sink in for a moment: The anthrax attacks are officially deemed, by the U.S. government itself, to have been false flags from within the U.S. bioweapons complex designed to whip up hatred of Muslims. The U.S. government admits it wasn’t Muslims who mailed U.S. government anthrax to Sens. Daschle and Leahy in envelopes bearing the message: “Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.”
So if it wasn’t radical Muslims, then who did it? The official scapegoat is the conveniently suicided Bruce Ivins, senior biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Md. But Graeme MacQueen, founding director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University, shows that the real perpetrators were the same insiders who orchestrated 9/11. In his magisterial The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy,* MacQueen writes: “All evidence indicates that the master narrative of the fall [anthrax] attacks had been established prior to 9/11 inter alia setting up Iraq through false statements about its anthrax supplies and means of delivery.” (p. 139)
MacQueen shows that the individuals set up to be blamed for the 9/11 “hijackings” were also set up in advance to be blamed for the anthrax attacks. When the FBI’s preliminary investigation showed the anthrax was of American provenance, and couldn’t have come from Iraq, the 9/11-anthrax coup perpetrators were forced to change their story and suppress or downplay all of the many links they had created between the anthrax attacks and the 9/11 hijacker patsies.
Why is it so important to pull the 2001 anthrax affair out of the memory hole? First, because it transformed America at least as much as 9/11 did. Without the anthrax attacks, Sens. Daschle and Leahy would have blocked the Constitution-annulling USA Patriot Act. Without that anthrax, we would still have a Constitution.
And here’s another reason to remember the 2001 anthrax deception: If we let our government get away with attacking its own citizens with an ultra-weaponized biological warfare agent, and even reward the biowar community with a 700% budget increase for attacking us, God knows what they will have in store for us in the future. (To learn how the anthrax perpetrators leveraged their attack on America into a massive cash windfall, read Kenneth King’s Germs Gone Wild: How the Unchecked Development of Domestic Biodefense Threatens America.)
Indeed, the current Covid-19 pandemic (or “plannedemic”) suggests the bioweaponeers learned a lesson from the anthrax experience: Unleash a hideous bioweapon and, instead of being punished, you will be lavishly rewarded. Today, the biowar community is getting an even bigger windfall from made-in-a-lab SARS-CoV-2 than they got from anthrax. (For evidence that SARSCoV-2 is an engineered pathogen, read my interview with biological warfare expert Dr. Meryl Nass at www.unz.com.)
If we had remembered the 2001 anthrax deception and demanded justice—and the end of all bioweapons programs—the Covid-19 plannedemic would never have happened. The lesson is clear: We must scream from the rooftops that SARSCoV-2, like the 2001 anthrax, is almost certainly an engineered scourge. We must insist that the perpetrators be tracked down and imprisoned for life, that the Biological Weapons Convention be fully enforced, and that the entire global bioweapons sector be terminated with extreme prejudice.
There may not be much time. Advances in biotechnology, especially genetic engineering, have vastly expanded the potential for bioweaponized malfeasance. Bill Gates’s “Pandemic 2,” race-specific bioweapons, and more are on the horizon.
If perpetrators are not held accountable for past crimes, and if we don’t insist that international conventions banning bioweapons be strictly enforced, we will be facing a truly nightmarish future.
*Purchase The 2001 Anthrax Deception (softcover, 216 pages, $20 plus $4 S&H inside the U.S.) from AFP, 117 La Grange Avenue, La Plata, MD 20646. Call AMERICAN FREE PRESS toll free at 1-888-699-6397 to charge, Mon.-Thu. 9-5 ET.
Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions. Since 2007, Dr. Barrett has been informally blacklisted from teaching in American colleges and universities. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, public speaker, author, and talk radio host. He lives in rural western Wisconsin.
