bread crumbs

This morning Ron Suskind was interviewed on National Public Radio. Suskind is a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and a former national correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. Based on numerous interviews within the administration and the CIA, Suskind just wrote a book detailing how the highest echelons of the Bush Administration, including Bush and Cheney, knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction long before the invasion and later instructed the CIA to fabricate "evidence" of a connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks on 9/11. You can hear the interview here.

On a related note, Greenwald has been relentlessly following the circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide of Bruce Ivins. Ivins was an army scientist in a biological research lab at Fort Detrick who was suspected of involvement with the anthrax attacks on prominent Americans shortly after 9/11. Starting September 18, 2001, someone sent letters with anthrax to 2 US senators and a number of news anchors, killing 5 people. As Greenwald notes:

It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

Moreover, based on anonymous sources, ABC News reported during this time that the anthrax that was used had a unique composition showing that it came from Iraq. The timing shortly after 9/11 and the content of this reporting provided support for the Bush administration's (false) narrative that Iraq was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center, thereby increasing support for the subsequent invasion. In response to Greenwald's efforts, two prominent journalism professors have started a campaign to force ABC to disclose it's anonymous sources for the anthrax story. Based on their knowledge of journalistic ethics, they have formulated the following three questions that ABC should answer:

1. Sources who are granted confidentiality give up their rights when they lie or mislead the reporter. Were you lied to or misled by your sources when you reported several times in 2001 that anthrax found in domestic attacks came from Iraq or showed signs of Iraqi involvement?

2. It now appears that the attacks were of domestic origin and the anthrax came from within U.S. government facilities. This leads us to ask you: who were the “four well-placed and separate sources” who falsely told ABC News that tests conducted at Fort Detrick showed bentonite in the anthrax sent to Sen. Tom Daschle, causing ABC News to connect the attacks to Iraq in multiple reports over a five day period in October, 2001?

3. A substantially false story that helps make the case for war by raising fears about enemies abroad attacking the United States is released into public debate because of faulty reporting by ABC News. How that happened and who was responsible is itself a major story of public interest. What is ABC News doing to re-report these events, to figure out what went wrong and to correct the record for the American people who were misled?

On yet another related note, yesterday government and defense counsel started their closing arguments before a military commission in Guantanamo that is deciding whether Salim Hamdan is guilty of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. From 1998 until 2001, Hamdan was one of Osama Bin Laden's chauffeurs. Here's the amazing thing: even if Hamdan were to be acquitted from all charges (a small likelihood when the "impartial" jury consists of military officers), the U.S. will continue to detain him until the Global War on Terror is declared over. That's right, regardless of the outcome of these proceedings, Hamdan will not be released. In the words of Hamdan to the military judge at an earlier stage:

If you ask me what is the color of this paper, I say white. You say black. I say white. You say black. I say, okay, it's black -- and you say white. This is the American government.