Needlenose

The Anthrax attacks following 9/11 have always disturbed me. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but it was odd that Shrubya put a bumbling fool on the case who smeared the wrong guy (who ended up getting a bunch of our taxpayer money in recompense), then put a team on it that has dragged it out for years. Then, on the eve of getting grand jury approval to start a trial, the key suspect of the new investigation mysteriously commits suicide – amidst revelations that he was a known nut-jub.

To top it off, Senator Patrick Leahy just came out to say that he believes the anthrax terrorist didn’t act alone:”:

If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people,” Leahy told FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III at a hearing yesterday. “I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or accessories after the fact. I believe that there are others who can be charged with murder.”

Great, now we’re gonna be stuck with decades of Conspiracy Nuts writing books and creating documentaries about ‘the 2nd Germsman’ on the grassy knoll. Me? While I doubt there was a real conspiracy behind the attacks, I am quite convinced that the Cheney Shrubya Administration cynically used the attacks to increase public, media & Congressional fear in order to sell their crazy wars, and more…purposefully put the “B Team” on the case to drag it out beyond the point where anybody but conspiracy nuts would remember it (not hard here in the U.S.).

Only really stupid terrorists would unleash germs on an enemy – and terrorists are usually crazy, not stupid.The as-yet-unexplained anthrax spore attacks following September 11th had an effect missing from the twin towers event – they struck terror in the heart of Main Street U.S.A. The Al Qaeda attacks, horrific as they were, seemed isolated, freakish, and…obvious. The anthrax attacks were spread across several states, with seemingly random casualties. But how seriously should we take the threat of germ-based bioterror?

Don’t be ridiculous, we can’t take it seriously at all.  Bioweapons are games for superpowers.   But even if a motley gang of terrorists were given something like a souped-up weaponized smallpox, why would they use it?  Sure, they’d give the Great Satan a black eye, killing a few hundred thousand or even a million people - but the West has groups like the CDC and modern infrastructure.

The major die-off would be in the third-world – in those failed or failing states where the terrorists and their extended families live.  In the earliest moments of a super plague, people would be jumping on planes and spreading the pathogen across the globe.

Terrorists may be crazy, but I wouldn’t call them stupid.