US anthrax scare: why the silence on right-wing terrorism?

Date: 29th Oct '01

Name: AFIB article

Taken from ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN (http://www.antifa.net/af/afib.html)

US anthrax scare:
WHY THE SILENCE ON RIGHT-WING TERRORISM?

News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/oct2001/anth-o27.shtml
By Patrick Martin

Amid the saturation media coverage of the anthrax attacks in Florida, New
Jersey, New York and Washington, DC, a central political issue is being
suppressed. There is every likelihood that those responsible for mailing
anthrax spores to media and government targets are right-wing extremists
bent on spreading panic and creating the conditions for new attacks on
democratic rights. Many such elements have close political links to the
Republican Party and the Bush administration.

So much misinformation has been spread by government spokesmen and
rebroadcast by the media that it is difficult to be sure of many of the
facts surrounding the anthrax scare. More than a dozen people have
contracted the disease, which is relatively rare among humans but not
unusual among farm animals. Three people have died, four others have
contracted the more dangerous pulmonary form of the disease. Three letters
carrying anthrax spores in powder have been recovered, one at NBC News, one
at the New York Post, the third at the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom
Daschle.

Thousands of people have been tested for possible contamination and
hundreds of thousands affected by the shutdown of schools, workplaces and
public facilities and the cancellation of plane, train and bus service. The
overwhelming majority of the reports of possible anthrax contamination have
proven to be unfounded or the result of panic, largely provoked by
semi-hysterical media coverage.

Dozens of people have tested positive for exposure to anthrax spores, but
the majority of these are not actually infected. The significance of these
results is not clear. The tests show the presence of disease-fighting
antibodies, but there is no way to easily determine when the person came
into contact with anthrax. Many of those who initially test positive may
not be victims of a recent terrorist attack, but may have merely
encountered the bacteria at some time in their lives.

There is similar uncertainty over the significance of the presence of
spores, usually in minute quantities, in postal and other mail-processing
facilities. Anthrax spores have been known to persist dormant in the soil
for up to 80 years. Public health officials have not provided a baseline of
the "normal" occurrence of anthrax antibodies in the population, or of
anthrax spores in the environment, against which to compare the results of
the current tests.

The record of right-wing terrorism

The media, with the tacit encouragement of the Bush administration and
congressional leaders, encourages the notion that the anthrax attacks
represent a second wave of Middle East-based terrorism, following the
September 11 suicide hijackings. There are sporadic attempts to link the
anthrax mailings to the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, although none of
the evidence so far made public substantiates such suspicions. On the
contrary, the circumstances surrounding the anthrax attacks--the method
employed, the targets chosen, previous experience--suggest that homegrown
American fascists are the perpetrators.

The past two decades have seen the rise within the Republican Party of
extreme-right and Christian fundamentalist elements, many of them linked to
a fascist underground of racists, militia fanatics and anti-abortion
activists. Individuals and groups sharing the political agenda of the
ultra-right have been responsible for the vast majority of terrorist
actions in the United States in recent years, including the bloodiest such
attack in US history prior to September 11--the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing
by right-wing militia supporter Timothy McVeigh, which killed 168 people.
Anti-abortion extremists have murdered doctors, bombed clinics and planted
the bomb that killed one person at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

There is a history of rightist elements seeking to obtain anthrax for use
as a weapon of terror. In 1998 a microbiologist with ties to white
supremacist groups was arrested in Las Vegas on charges of unauthorized
possession of an anthrax strain that turned out to be non-lethal. In 1999,
in testimony before Congress, FBI Director Louis Freeh said that "a growing
number, while still small, of 'lone offender' and extremist splinter
elements of right-wing groups have been identified as possessing or
attempting to develop or use" weapons of mass destruction.

Only last May, Freeh told a congressional committee that the FBI had
prevented two "potentially large-scale, high-casualty attacks being planned
by organized right-wing extremists." These included the blowing up of a
large propane storage facility in Elk Grove, California, and the raiding of
National Guard armories and attacks on electric power lines in several
southern states. In the latter case, which involved militia members from
Georgia, South Carolina and Florida, Freeh said the goal was "to create
social and political chaos, thereby forcing the US Government to declare
martial law, an act the group believed would lead to a violent overthrow of
the Government by the American people."

Rightist elements have a history of making threats involving anthrax.
According to a California-based center that monitors such events, there
were 172 false anthrax threats in the United States from January 1998 to
April 2001. Of these, one third were made against abortion clinics. The
current anthrax attacks have been accompanied by a barrage of threats
against abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood offices throughout the
United States--threats that have gone largely unreported in the media.

The National Abortion Federation said more than 30 clinics in 14 states and
the District of Columbia had received letters claiming to contain anthrax,
some with references to the Army of God, an extreme-right anti-abortion
group. Planned Parenthood said 90 family planning offices and abortion
clinics in more than a dozen states had received similar threats. Each of
six Planned Parenthood clinics in the Washington, DC area received a
powder-filled envelope enclosing a letter from the Army of God that warned,
"You have been exposed to anthrax. We are going to kill all of you."

That right-wing extremists are responsible for the current round of anthrax
attacks is further suggested by the choice of targets: Senator Daschle, the
most prominent Democrat in Washington, and the offices of the major
television networks, regarded by the far right, however incorrectly, as
bastions of liberalism. The casualties up to now have all been workers in
the federal government and the media, long demonized by the extreme right.

The role of the media

Frequently, what does not appear in the American media is as significant as
what does. It is as though the attack on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon blotted out the bloody experience with right-wing terrorism in
America--the Unabomber, Oklahoma City, the Aryan Nations, abortion-related
bombings and assassinations. If the anthrax attacks had taken place before
September 11, the prime suspects would have been anti-abortion zealots or
right-wing militia fanatics seeking to avenge the execution of Timothy
McVeigh.

The White House and Pentagon recognize that a clear-cut link between the
anthrax attacks and homegrown American rightists would cut across their
efforts to generate public support for the US military intervention in
Central Asia. While admitting that there is no concrete evidence of a
connection to Islamic fundamentalists, let alone Iraq, the Bush
administration tacitly encourages the belief that Middle East-based
terrorists are responsible for the anthrax mailings.

Those actually engaged in investigating the anthrax mailings, however, have
been compelled to consider the likelihood of right-wing involvement, and a
few hints have begun to creep into the newspaper coverage. According to an
October 24 report in the New York Times, "investigators who at first
thought the anthrax mailed to Mr. Daschle was so finely milled and highly
concentrated that it was likely to have been obtained from a
state-sponsored weapons program have now revised their assessment." An FBI
source told the Associated Press the anthrax "could be locally produced
given the right circumstances."

The Washington Post reported the same day, "investigators have found no
connection between the Sept. 11 plot and the anthrax mailings, numerous
officials said yesterday. Although they continue to operate under the
assumption that there might be a link, investigators from the FBI, the US
Postal Service and other agencies say privately that the mailings do not
have the earmarks of an al Qaeda terrorist operation and seem more likely
to have come from a domestic source."

On October 26, White House press spokesman Ari Fleischer declared that
federal investigators had concluded that a skilled microbiologist with
access to lab facilities could have produced the anthrax used in the
mailings, without a vast military or government apparatus. The substance,
he admitted, "could be produced by a broader range of people" than the
foreign governments generally cited in media speculation, most frequently
Iraq and the former Soviet Union.

Even more suggestive is a lengthy front-page article that appeared October
26 in the Washington Post, reporting that the anthrax mailed to Daschle's
office had been chemically treated to make it spread more readily through
the air. "The United States, the former Soviet Union and Iraq are the only
three nations known to have developed the kind of additives," the newspaper
said. The article continued: "A government official with direct knowledge
of the investigation said yesterday that the totality of the evidence in
hand suggests that it is unlikely that the spores were originally produced
in the former Soviet Union or Iraq."

The statement points to the conclusion that the anthrax mailed to Daschle's
office was either stolen from US military stocks or supplied directly by US
military personnel with access to supplies. In either case, it is far more
likely that the anthrax was passed to American fascists, who have numerous
sympathizers in the military, than to Islamic fundamentalists.

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