The largest investigation in FBI history finally concluded that one of their own scientists, Bruce Ivins, was responsible for killing five people with anthrax-laced letters in 2001. By the simple expedient defining five deaths as "mass destruction" this incident became a strangely persistent vindication for continuing the WMD hysteria even after the Iraq War fiasco. Amazingly, WMD hysterics are still as noisy as ever, and as ignorant.
In 2008, a Congressional "Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism" issued The World at Risk. The Commission "unanimously concluded that bioterrorism was the most likely WMD threat to the world." It helps that conventional bombs, machine guns, or jumbo aircraft crashed into tall buildings are not defined as "WMD threats."
Nuclear warfare is still counted as WMD, yet the WMD Commission is more afraid of anthrax or Botox. Weapons of Mass Destruction used to include chemical warfare, but no longer. Fretting about nerve gas turned out to be a less lucrative fear-mongering industry than lobbying for juicy biological research grants, and for mountainous stockpiles of vaccines and antiviral drugs.
"Especially troubling," says the Commission, "is the lack of priority given to the development of… new vaccines, drugs, and production processes required to meet the modern threats from man-made and naturally occurring epidemics." Priority means an extra $17 billion of deficit spending over five years. But notice how "naturally occurring epidemics" were snuck into a report ostensibly dealing with terrorist weapons.
Alleged sources of a bioterrorist threats "include the bacteria that cause anthrax and plague, the viruses that cause smallpox and Ebola hemorrhagic fever, and poisons of natural origin such as ricin and botulinum toxin."
The Commission knows those agents are far less credible terrorist weapons than bombs, guns, airplanes and arson. (Anyone who tries to kill you with Ebola would die trying).
So they are stuck with anthrax, claiming "a bioterrorist attack involving anthrax bacterial spores [is] the most likely near-term biological threat to the United States." Billions were wasted because of anthrax in 2001, and the Commission is determined to waste billions more. For those receiving federal loot, Bruce Ivins was a gift that keeps on giving.
The Commission report said, "The 2001 anthrax mailings were not the first incident of bioterrorism in the United States. In 1984, the Rajneeshees, a religious cult in Oregon, sought to reduce voter turnout and win control of the county government in an upcoming election by temporarily incapacitating local residents with a bacterial infection. In . . . September 1984, cult members contaminated 10 restaurant salad bars in a town in Oregon with salmonella, a common bacterium that causes food poisoning. The attack sickened 751 people, some seriously." Sickened seriously! If that isn’t WMD, what is?
"A decade later," the report goes on, "members of a Japanese doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo released anthrax bacterial spores from the roof of a building in Tokyo. Fortunately, this attack failed. . . Had Aum succeeded in acquiring a virulent strain and delivered it effectively, the casualties could have been in the thousands." That is illiterate nonsense. There is no effective way of dispersing anthrax from the roof of a building.
Lacking evidence, the WMD lobby dreams up scenarios. The report tells us White House insecurity experts "created a chilling scenario of how terrorists could launch an anthrax attack in the United States [with] a single aerosol attack in one city delivered by a truck using a concealed improvised spraying device." This "chilling scenario" is science fiction.
In "WMD Doomsday Distractions," an April 2005 column available at Cato.org, I explained that, "Scenario spinners speculate about mixing anthrax with water and somehow spraying it (without detection) from trucks, crop dusters or unmanned aircraft. But to die from anthrax, you need to inhale thousands of spores. Those spores clump together and mix with dust, yet they must end up neither too large nor too small, or else they would be sneezed out, coughed up or swallowed. Even if enough particles of the perfect size could be sprayed into the breezes, the odds are extremely low of infecting more than few dozen people that way. And none would die if they took Cipro promptly."
Tallying up all of the world’s bioterrorism attacks to date, the final score is five killed from anthrax, plus one Bulgarian assassinated by being injected with ricin. That brings the world total of bioterrorist fatalities up to half a dozen — a bizarre concept of "mass destruction," and a feeble excuse for dispensing billions more federal dollars to those using scare tactics to raid the empty Treasury.
