Guerrilla History - Amerithrax at 20 w/ Robbie Martin

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Comrade tier and above will have access to all Intelligence Briefings. We have another fun Intelligence Briefing this time, with a special guest!  For this conversation to mark the 20th anniversary of the Amerithrax case, we bring onto the show Robbie Martin from Media Roots Radio, who has been doing a tremendous amount of research into the topic.   Robbie Martin (alongside his sister Abby) is one of the two cohosts of Media Roots Radio, a show they've been doing since 2010 with a critical eye on American politics and imperialism.  You can listen to Media Roots's public episodes wherever you get your podcasts, and you can support them and get bonus content by subscribing to their patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mediarootsradio.  You can follow Robbie on twitter @FluorescentGrey and Media Roots @MediaRootsNews. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. This is a guerrilla history intelligence briefing, and it's going to be a very interesting one.

I'm your host, Henry Huckimacki. I'm joined by only one of my usual co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing? I'm doing great, Henry. It's good to be with you. Yeah, it's always nice to see you. I'm glad that we've been seeing each other quite a bit recently. We're unfortunately not joined by our other co-host, Brett O'Shea,

host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. But we're hoping to see Brett back again very, very soon. But today, for our intelligence briefing, we have a very, very interesting topic and a great guest to talk about it. We're going to be talking about the Ameritrax case at 20th, 20th anniversary of the Ameritrax case. And we're joined by Robbie Martin of Media Roots Radio. Hello, Robbie. Welcome to the show.

Hi. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So I guess to get this underway, I'll just briefly mention why we're bringing you on to talk about this. And then I'll turn it over to you to kind of remind the listeners or maybe acquaint the listeners for the first time if they're a little bit young. with what Ameritrax was. So I'm a longtime media roots radio listener. And over the past, well, while now, you've been kind of exploring the Ameritrax case in very long form. I believe that your third episode of the series was like five hours and 40 minutes long, something like that.

It's a lot of material. But not that many other people have really been looking at Amerithrax, nowhere near as deep as you have. And I've really appreciated that you've turned the lens on that, particularly for this 20th anniversary of the case when basically any other discussion of Amerithrax has completely died out. So thank you for putting that together. The resources that you've provided along with the episodes themselves are really interesting and invaluable for people that want to look into this themselves. So thank you for that. Robbie, let's turn it over to you now. Can you just lay out the the bullet points of what the Ameritrax case was for people who have completely forgotten what it was.

And then maybe Adnan will have some clarifying points that he'll want to bring up about it. Sure. So this idea of bioterrorism was sort of in the popular cultural zeitgeist, even before the 9-11 attacks during the Bill Clinton era. You can find a lot of stuff that he said, even in speeches, some of his advisors would say about the possibility of Saddam Hussein launching a biological weapons attack against this country. It was something that was, so you can go back and find a lot of clips of officials saying things like this. So it was sort of in the air. It was, it was, it was something that people were kind of talking about. There was even actually a CBS show, and the title escapes me now,

what the show was called, but there was a CBS show in production that actually had an episode about an anthrax attack that was due to air sometime in early October, incidentally, and it was scrapped because of a real attack, which I'll explain now what that was. So after the 9-11 attacks, which I'm sure most of your listeners are familiar with, you know, was a traumatic incident for most people, even people who did not live in New York, who watched this horrible event unfolding on television, you're basically watching, you know, up to 3,000 people dying on loop on television for weeks on end, you know, from multiple angles. It was a horribly traumatic experience. And right after this happened, a lot of officials in the United States government

and pundits, specifically sort of the neoconservative class of pundits, started hyping up that they believe this was just one of a series of attacks that was coming down the pike. And specifically, people like Richard Pearl in the Bush administration and other neoconservatives like Robert Kagan and Bill Crystal, they would basically say that the next attack they believed is going to be biological or chemical. A lot of them would lean more towards the biological. And when I say this, I mean this is like within a week of 9-11 happening. Now, typically, and I'm sure your audience has understands this,

when the media or the pundant class hype something up, fearmonger something, it usually doesn't happen. It usually kind of just fizzles out and it ends up being something that they've tried to hype us up or fearmonger us into doing something, right? this time surprisingly their predictions all these all this talk about a impending biological weapons attack actually comes true so not only did the neoconservatives in the bush administration get basically their dream event this new pearl harbor in the form of 9-11 they got a second event that they were also fantasizing about which was a biological attack they literally got one a month

after 9-11, actually less than a month, starting on October 5th, a photo editor working for American Media Inc., specifically the sun, a tabloid put out by American Media Inc., dies from inhalation anthrax after going into a coma on October 3rd. And this death that happened in Florida sort of kick-started a hysteria among aspects of the American public where most of the Most people at that time, including people in the media, were like, this seems like a biological terrorist attack. It happened less than a month after 9-11. This has got to be terrorism. Strangely, the Bush administration, John Ashcroft, they didn't say anything about this being terrorism for at least a week.

They were mum about it. They even tried to tell people that, well, maybe this guy drank some water from a stream, and that's how he got anthrax. Now, we're talking about the first inhalation anthrax death in over like 30 years or something. So the coincidence, you know, if this wasn't a terrorist attack, it was an extreme coincidence, right? But within a week, suddenly the Bush administration says, sure, this is terrorism. It's now a criminal investigation. The FBI can go in and look into this now before it was only the CDC's purview. And what happened was we started to, the FBI, the CDC, and the media started to explain to the American public that there were these letters, these anthrax-laced letters that were being sent through the mail, and these anthrax-laced letters, four of them that we knew of for sure, were targeting famous people in the media and famous politicians.

And when I say famous politicians, I mean two politicians specifically, Patrick Leahy, who incidentally just retired, like I think yesterday, and Tom Dashel. Now, the only thing significant about these men is that Tom Dashel was the Senate Majority Leader at the time, and both of them were asking for a delay on passing the Patriot Act. They merely wanted some extra time to discuss it. The Bush administration was putting an immense amount of pressure on the House and Senate. to just pass this immediately without reading it, essentially, because it was a huge bill. They wanted to delay it a little bit, and then suddenly they get both of those politicians get sent weaponized anthrax. Now, the term weapons grade, weaponized anthrax was already in the mix when they had looked

into these other letters that were sent to New York Post, Tom Brokaw, but the quality of the anthrax in those envelopes, and I mean it was real anthrax. It was more of a sandy-like kind of granular material that didn't, like, fly into the air and become like a cloud of powder. Now, apparently this Tom Dashel letter, once the same person sent these other letters, I should mention. These were all sent by the same person or persons. By the time Tom Dashel gets his letter, that grade of anthrax in that letter is described as a very powderized, almost nearly white form that turns into a, a cloud. So basically what we're dealing with here is someone who was sending these letters was able to obtain very high grade, very sophisticated weapons-grade anthrax spores.

Regular anthrax spores are, they're not the most impossible thing for a person to cultivate, but to take them from the stage of growing anthrax spore, a spore culture, to weaponizing those spores and turning it into something as a weapon. It requires basically like government level sophistication or a highly sophisticated lab that would be very, very expensive. So if it was, you know, whoever did this either had access to government facilities or something akin to a laboratory that would be like a government contractor level of sophistication or a very sophisticated lab in general. And maybe you can correct me on this since you have a science background. But my understanding is that you can only handle anthrax legally in the United States with a BSL level three lab or above.

So basically this narrows down where they could have obtained this anthrax. And also it narrows down who manufactured this anthrax. They didn't recognize the manufacturing grade of it. When I say they, I mean the investigators. They just recognized the strain. And the reason that they immediately identified this as being an American-born attack was this vague understanding that the aim strain, which is what the strain of the anthrax was in these envelopes, was a strain of anthrax that was discovered in the wild, but was essentially taken in by the U.S. government and because it was found to be much more potent than other strains in the wild. So they specifically, it's almost like, you know, weed growers. They find like a really high THC strain, you know, and then they, like, want to make that one, like the one they sell rather than like the, you know, the mids or whatever.

So it's kind of like, Ames is like the top shelf anthrax grade. And they, so basically really early on, the FBI knew and understood that this was a domestic attack. They even developed a what they call, you know, like a killer profile, a suspect profile describing this potential suspect as a lone nut scientist. And so that was in the mix very early on. But what's very strange is you had this parallel track going in the media. Oh, sorry, I should also mention that five people ended up dying from this weaponized anthrax, five seemingly random people that were sort of described as sort of collateral damage. They got cross-contaminated letters or they died from cross-contamination.

but when I say that the FBI and other people were, you know, openly saying this was a domestic attack done by possibly a lone nut, that was one narrative that was in the background, and it was sort of being talked about out of the media a little bit. But then you had this sort of overriding narrative where the Bush administration and people outside the Bush administration who were allied with them were continuing to hype up this idea that Saddam Hussein, somehow manufactured this anthrax. And it sort of linked back to this idea that the neocons were trying to say originally right after 9-11, which is that Saddam Hussein might have been behind 9-11. This was sort of a new evolution in that theory where it was like, you know, if Saddam Hussein was involved in 9-11 or not, we don't know for sure, but we do know that he's probably

involved in the anthrax and that he might have given it to al-Qaeda. So here's what we believe is a three-way connection, you know, between bin Laden, Sanam Hussein and these al-Qaeda terrorists somehow making anthrax. And there was already leading up to the anthrax attacks, which happened on October 5th, there was already this strange narrative going around the media that the 9-11 hijackers were planning to do an anthrax attack next. And this was because one of the hijackers was trying to rent a crop duster. He even tried to get a loan for a modified crop duster.

He wanted to get a $600,000 loan from the USDA. which they refused to get a modified crop duster to basically fill the plane with, like, as much chemical or biological material as he possibly could. So I don't know if I did a great job giving you the preamble there of everything, but basically that the other track that was going at the same time that's important to understand was that there was this propaganda track that people in the Bush administration and outside of it were trying to push where they wanted the public to believe that Saddam Hussein had done this attack, even though the evidence was already, it was already very evident that it

did not come from a foreign actor, that it came from a domestic source. It was the aimstrain. That enough showed, you know, the investigators that it was probably domestic. And I'm trying to think of what else I'm missing here. I guess the main, the main point is that this propaganda, this hysteria, because you think 9-11, you know, it only happened in New York city, even though 3,000 people die from this horrific attack, it was a one-off. What anthrax did was it made people believe that this was going to be a way of life, that terrorism was now a way of life. It's not just, you know, the terrorist flying planes into buildings in New York. It's now that anyone going to their mailbox could potentially die from a biological weapon. And that made

it, I think, much more scary. It made Americans feel it really, I think, flipped that paradigm into that post 9-11 era in a psychological sense and the Bush administration clearly understood all these things even though Bush never came out and said you know I think Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks he never had to say that he didn't because they kind of put it out there in insinuations and hints and they knew exactly what they were doing I believe because by the time they pitched the Iraq war to the UN Colin Powell you know they choose Colin Powell because he's the bipartisan most trustworthy guy, you know, that your Democrat aunt would trust, right? But they put him out there. And what is his speech mostly about?

It's, I would say, 75% about anthrax. He holds up a prop vial of anthrax even. And he says, he even makes a comparison to the anthrax envelope. He says, Saddam Hussein has this quantity of anthrax. And imagine if this quantity of anthrax was put through our mail. So he's not saying Saddam Hussein did the anthrax attacks, but he's insinuating it as hard as he possibly could. And I think that's the key to how they really pitch the Iraq war. And one other thing I wanted to mention is that this idea that the Bush administration lied about WMDs, I think really overshadows and does a disservice to what they actually did, which is that they used the term WMD as a metonym as code for anthrax. And they did from day one. That's how they used it.

The idea that they were talking about a catch-all thing that meant chemical weapons and nukes, that came later on. It was all about anthrax at the beginning. And you could trade this timeline is very easy to go back and look at. The first time Bush says that he was talking about anthrax, and I believe that they knew that if they said Saddam had anthrax, it would be too easy to be debunked. The reason they said Saddam has WMDs and the reason they planted the idea that WMD men anthrax is it gives them a little bit of distance to have leeway to basically say whatever the fuck they wanted to. And that's what they

did. But they did it more cleverly, I think, than people give them credit for. They knew what not to say. So I guess that's my spiel on that. Sure. It was a very comprehensive overview of it. I'm just going to make a quick science point before I turn it over to Adnan. So you mentioned the aim strain. For listeners who are interested, that was because it was discovered in Ames, Iowa, very much a homegrown American anthrax strain. And as you mentioned, was in several labs in the United States, including at USAMRID, which I'm sure will come up later in the conversation. You also mentioned correctly that it's a BSL3 organism. And I think that listeners might not have any idea of what that means. So just for comparison's sake, some other BSL3 level organisms,

It's the second highest level of biosafety containment are things like West Nile virus, Hanta virus, COVID is a BSL3 organism, plague, tuberculosis, botulism. These are all BSL3 organisms. So it's not things like Ebola, for example, which is BSL4. That's the highest level of biosafety containment. But it's just one rung below that. still a very, very heavily controlled pathogen. Adnan, let me turn this over to you now for how we want to advance with the conversation.

I'm sure that there was some things that came up that you want to follow up on. Oh, yes. Well, thank you so much, Robbie. That was a really great overview. And I think it came to, you know, I think what the main consequence and point was, which I want to follow up on, but it might be useful at some point also to go back and look at some of the details of what happened. and transpired and, you know, investigate, you know, what was happening and unfolding during the

investigation. But it seems like the main point you're getting at here is that these neocons, and I think it's very important that you focused on them and their kind of perception of politics, because they seem to be very interested in demonstration effects in shock and awe. Even, you know, Rumsfeld sort of talked about it. In some ways, this was sort of. of shock and awe on, you know, the American people. I mean, not that they necessarily were responsible for it, but that the way they tried to exploit circumstances of emergency and fear is to turn it into a demonstration effect where maybe they wouldn't have to allege specifically or dot the eyes and cross the T's on the links of, you know, who was responsible. But they could

say, look at how terrible and frightening that was and just imagine if Saddam Hussein has what he could do. They didn't say that he did necessarily do it, but it was really a demonstration effect. And these neocons also seem to have this idea. It seems that you create historical conditions and circumstances that achieve the political outcome you want. It's not like just, history happens, but they had this very kind of radical, you must create these conditions, and then it will have consequences, like in the Middle East. If we topple one dictator, it'll lead to all the other dictators recognizing, oh, you better follow U.S. dictates and so on. So I'm wondering if you wanted to elaborate a little bit more on this kind of neocon approach to the

situation because, you know, you made, I think, a wonderful point that they were really promoting that there is a new reality, but they wanted to create that new reality, that Americans live in constant fear of terrorism, and that it wasn't just an event that happened in New York and D.C. on that day, but it was this new reality that Americans had to get used to this idea and understanding of looking at the world in a new way. yeah i mean the neoconservative role in just this specifically could you know you could almost write a whole book on it because it's so important i think what they did and i think that that game that they played of not directly saying it is sort of the key to understanding how they did it um because

like you said they want to create the conditions to make history well how do you create the conditions to make people believe something in a in a strong way and I honestly believe that just sort of bludgeoning someone into their head so-and-so did this you know the sonama did this it's actually less effective than getting someone to come to that conclusion or make them believe they're coming to that conclusion on their own and I think that's a very important psychological ploy that the neocons used which again speaks to the level of sophistication that you know we think of Bush as a clown after 9-11 well it's like people working under him And outside of his administration as part of PNAC, they were, they were dialed in.

I mean, they knew exactly what they were doing. And I think what's really interesting is, you know, this debate has been ongoing for decades in the anti-war movement. What did the neocons believe? Are they Trotskyites? Are they true believers? Do they believe in, you know, the American Empire, hegemony? I'm sure on some level they believe all those things. But I really think they're overriding ideology.

And it's very clear to me is Machiavellianism. they it's all about ends justifies the means and they know how to use these mocky million tricks so for example a really important i think neoconservative media appearance was on nine 12 which was fred kagan and his father don kagan and not only does don kagan again very presciently like some other neocons did say what if the terrorists had anthrax on that plane He says that on 9-12. I mean, it's a pretty prescient statement because that's, you know, a month later we get anthrax. But he said, him and his son say something really, really interesting on that broadcast.

And if people haven't listened to that, this is the infamous neocon clip where they actually call for an invasion of Palestinian territories as a response to 9-11, which is insane. But there's another interesting aspect of this interview that I think a lot of people didn't remember or pay attention to. And that was that when the host is basically trying to get Fred and Don Kagan pin down about who did this, who do we go after now. It's almost like they refuse to answer the question. They don't even want to like commit to bin Laden and al-Qaeda. They're like, you know what? It honestly doesn't matter who did this because anybody who would think of doing anything

like this to us should be treated like they did it to us. So that's the real reveal right there as they're saying, no, no, no, it doesn't matter, like the facts don't matter. We want to go attack all these people anyways in the Middle East that hate us, and this is the perfect opportunity for us to do it. They just were saying it in a different way than that. And I think that that's a very, you know, that's very revealing of what they're really all about, but I don't know if that fully answers your, you asked me something more specifically about

neocons, and I feel like I kind of. Oh, no, no, I think that's on the right track. You know, was that whole thing about the reality based community versus And I'm forgetting what the other, but they were the makers of history, you know, where others react and they're sort of encumbered by the facts of what actually happened versus kind of remaking the world the way it should be. And so I think that's, you know, absolutely the case that they believed in things like the noble lie, you know, like this idea that, you know, in a very Machiavellian sort of perspective that the truth itself is really not the crucial. question you you know but if the lie the lie you know you can make a lie promote a lie if it serves an appropriate purpose like the underlying purpose is more important than the actual truth so that's why you're right that they resisted really the kind of investigatory approach to any of these you know

like even you know trying to associate the Taliban with al-Qaeda you know so there was slippage between the people who actually were responsible for organizing, financing, and arranging and recruiting the people who committed, you know, these acts of terror and the larger governing group in a territory that they may have been based in. They wanted, you know, to, you know, they wanted not to pursue this as a kind of hunt for bin Laden, but an idea that you had to end states because these states were fostering and promoting dangerous ideologies. And whether somebody did something or not, you had to take preemptive attacks against those who might even think of or imagine or want to harm the U.S.

So it's that kind of, so I guess, you know, I'm just wondering, bringing it back to the anthrax is the way in which this was a politics based entirely upon fear and promoting a kind of fear that, you know, allowed the American people to, you know, accept these messages because the idea that you could receive, people were, you know, being killed because of something that they received in the mail, a very, you know, you couldn't see who was doing it to, you were just sort of passively targeted. this was part of what made it so terrifying after the trauma of 9-11 was just like any moment something as innocuous as, you know, a letter, you know, the junk mail that you receive would come into your home, into your office, and you could be killed by it. This was sort of a sinister thing, you know, kind of environment. It promoted this extreme paranoia. for sure i mean i think it's you know i still you know have a tinge of of concern you know i i have to admit even sometimes when i still get on a plane i have like echoes of nine 11 it's like that made people i think feel uncomfortable about getting on an airplane in general this was so

much worse because yeah like you said it made people feel uncomfortable getting their own male and you even had you know i don't know how many americans i would say somewhere in the hundreds of thousands actually already rushing to put themselves on cipro after well actually even before the first attack this is what's so interesting is there was so much media hysteria about this even before it happened that people were already on cipro uh regular like people not even if government officials were already taking cipro before the first anthrax victim died and you actually had such a rush on CIPRO that there were dwindling supplies. And I want to say it's Rumsfeld or one of the top Bush officials who specifically, you know, whose old company made money

off of Cipro, I'm not 100% sure. There's other treatment of, there's other effective treatments for anthrax infection are prophylactic against anthrax. Cipro specifically is actually has a lot of really bad side effects. One of them is like permanent tendinitis, which other antibiotics. that deal with or anthrax do not cause so you know just the put the heavy-handed push for cypiro alone has sort of a agenda behind it you know but apart from the fear monger you're talking about um but yeah i mean it was it was meant to make us paralyzed with fear um and i think that when they had us by the balls like that is really when you know the iraic war becomes becomes unstoppable.

And I think that it's just people became so passive that the Bush administration knew they had pretty much a clear lane to go forward and do that. And they knew they never had to find any WMDs. So this idea, this whole public debate about like, well, if the Bush administration's so smart, why don't they implant WMDs in Iraq so that they could say they found out? It's like they didn't fucking care. They didn't care. Do you really think they cared to prove that argument?

they knew the argument was like a fake, vague talking point anyways, and it was our initially code for anthrax anyways. So that was what was important. Paul Wolfowitz actually admits in an interview years after he gets at the Bush administration, and all that other crap meant nothing. It was all about anthrax, and he makes that very clear. And guess what? Paul Wolfowitz is actually the guy who hired James Wolsey, the former CIA director, to prove that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks. Well, it didn't. really seemed like he did much legwork to investigate that. It seemed like James Woolsey actually did spend most of his time going on TV and just saying that Sanam did it. So, you know,

that's what the Bush administration chose to do. Paul Wolfowitz never came out and said Zadam did it, but he hired an ex-CIA director to go all over TV and say Saddam Hussein did it. I've got a couple quick points that I'm going to make. And then I've got a pretty big question that I think will take us some time, you know, between going back and forth and back and forth on this point. But first I want to talk about, you mentioned Sipro and this rush on Sipro. And it's something that I've mentioned in one of our previous episodes, but I'm going to get on my hobby horse again because this is one of the things that I've been an activist and an advocate for the longest, and that's compulsory licensing, people who listen to, I don't even remember

what episode it was in the past, but one of our episodes in the past, I talked about it. So in 2001, as you mentioned, after the anthrax attacks, everybody and their mom was trying to get Cipro. The United States did not have a strategic stockpile of Cipro at the time, at least not a significant one. There was a little bit in reserve, but not really that much. Now, who had the patents for Cipro in the United States, buyer, the German pharmaceutical company? And of course, when everybody's rushing to try to buy it up, and there's a lot of, no strategic stockpile left because it's already been exhausted, the price starts going through the roof and everybody still needs it. The government wants to reestablish a strategic stockpile

and buyer is set to make tons and tons of money. So that's when the U.S. government actually threatened to do something good for once, which is compulsory licensing. And just to remind listeners what compulsory licensing is, and I highly recommend you look it up, it's a process by which a country can basically break a company's patent rights if they feel that that company is not negotiating prices in a fair manner, particularly in the times of a public health crisis, for example. So company A has patent rights for drug X in this country. We need drug X. They jack the prices way up. So we say, okay, you're not negotiating fairly. We're going to break the patent. And therefore a generic company or a generic manufacturer can start producing a generic equivalent

of this drug in this country at an extremely low price. That's been done in several other countries before. The U.S. threatened buyer that they would do a compulsory license on CIPRO in the United States if they didn't renegotiate their prices because buyer was trying to play hardball. I mean, they were set to make an absolute ton of money on this. And of course, as soon as the United States said, well, you know, you're not negotiating very fairly, let's look at this compulsory licensing process. Immediately, buyer said, okay, okay, okay, we'll negotiate way down. You can have it at a third of the price. It doesn't matter. You can have it at whatever price you want, which just goes to show that, you know, when the government decides to actually do something beneficial, that might actually do something good, it's just that the government decides most of the time to not do things that are beneficial. listeners, advocate for compulsory licensing on all kinds of things. This is something that I do

all the time. Anyway, off of that hobby horse, back to what you were talking about, this kind of psychological trauma on people. I have a little bit of personal experience with this, which is I was six when the anthrax letters were going out. And I remember following the news, as much as, you know, a six-year-old can. My parents were telling me about it. I'd look in the newspaper. And I remember every time that the mail came in, I always was looking for, you know, like white powder tucked in the corners of the letter. And I was for years, like literally, like a decade. Every time that we had an unmarked letter come in the mailbox, like no return address, I was very, very uneasy about opening it for a decade. You know, I'm talking about a six-year-old

kid for a decade every time and my dad operates a home business so we have a lot of letters coming into the mail and a lot of people do not put their return addresses on them so every time i would pick up the mail you know or at least once a week i'd have an unmarked letter that i have this feeling in my stomach like what what is this in there why why is there an unmarked letter in our mailbox and of course it was because somebody was you know ordering pictures from my dad but uh you know you never really knew and it was something that was gnawing at the back of my mind. But to turn onto this big topic that I want to have us just kind of chat about for a while, and we've been touching on it, but I kind of want to just concretely get into this topic is the Ameritrax case had some

pretty significant impacts on both domestic policy and foreign policy. And the Ameritrax case was on everybody's consciousness for a few years and it had this huge impact. But then just a couple years afterwards, it was never in the news again. Everybody had basically forgotten about the case. So there's really two questions here. And we can go back and forth to talk about this, which is how did this case impact domestic and foreign policy? We've been talking about that a little bit already, but I think we can get a little bit

more, you know, deep into that. And then why has this case been so completely forgotten about by, as I mentioned before, we hit record about 2008. This was basically out of the national consciousness once again after one of the suspects committed suicide. We'll mention those, the suspects a little bit later. The second part of your question is going to be challenging to answer, but I will try. The first part, you're asking what impacted this have on domestic and foreign policy I think I'll start with the domestic

so you know a lot of people who have looked into this who don't accept what you could call the official story that you know Bruce Evans was the loan person behind this have long believed that whoever did this part of their motive was either to punish people who are delaying the Patriot Act or to try to scare them into passing the Patriot Act. Now, that's an interesting theoretical motive because it does appear to be the case. And I say that because the Patriot Act, which is one of the most consequential pieces of post-9-11

legislation, the Justice Department, John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney from the White House, were basically badgering any of the leaders in the congress and senate to just pass this without reading it like literally they wanted it passed immediately it was a giant bill uh that would have taken most people probably at least a whole day of reading if not more to really digest it and understand it um they wanted them to pass this bill pretty much sight unseen like we need this to protect us and the rhetoric immediately shifted to they don't want to protect us like tom dashel lehi these basically milk toast democrats were actually putting americans in danger by not just blindly passing this and that's an interesting sort

of rhetorical paradigm because when you really look back at their politics they're pretty neoliberal pretty generic they didn't really go hard against the iraq war in fact they both voted for the patriot act in the end. So really, they really weren't that radically against it, but they were both targeted during the time when it was like supposed to be passed. So it does seem like whoever sent these anthrax letters to them did it to try to affect domestic policy or did it surrounding some kind of domestic policy event. And that's a very strange thing. If they, if Tom Dashel and Patrick Leahy didn't get sent those letters, would they have passed it as quickly? I would say probably. I mean, I don't know if it had that much of an effect, but I think whoever sent it to them wanted to try and shift

domestic policy. They wanted to try to increase the odds of the Patriot Act going through smoothly. Whether they achieved that or not, I don't know. But in terms of other domestic things it affected, let me think carefully here. I mean, for a while, you know, it was normal. to get mail in your mailbox that would have like a plastic bag around at saying this mail has been blasted with radiation, you know, which is sort of a weird, you know, I don't know if that's a domestic policy ship, but that's sort of a weird thing to, you know, Americans would go to their mailbox and be like, oh, it's not anthrax, but they blasted my mail with radiation because they thought anthrax might be in it. So that was happening for a while. In terms of other domestic

policy shifts, I'm actually, I'm actually, I feel like I'm at a loss. I know there's other things. So if there's something else you were thinking of, you wanted to remind me of, I'd be happy to comment on it. But I think the one thing that comes to mind for me is that this did shape our pandemic response now in a weird, indirect roundabout way because the Bush administration's next fear-mongering tool after anthrax was terrorists are going to unleash a smallpox attack on not just the United States, but evidently the world, because I don't know how you're going to stop, you know, smallpox from spreading randomly everywhere. So they were basically saying get prepared, the next attack is going to be smallpox. And in fact, the Bush administration was asking for $500 million to produce 300 million smallpox vaccines for every American and to make it mandatory. So we have actually a track, a pathway that goes all the way from anthrax to COVID-19 now

and the way that the government is handling it. It was a little, it's a little different, but all the steps are there, and you can sort of look back on this and be like, wow, that's really crazy that we dodge that bullet, that we could have been given mandatory vaccines against a completely imaginary attack following anthrax simply because of the Bush administration's ability

to just keep amping up the fear, just amp it up, amp it up until it's like, okay, I'll take the smallpox vaccine. It's like, that's basically where they wanted us to go. And to me, that's really disturbing, because, I mean, the smallpox vaccine, luckily, a lot of scientists got together and said, look, this is super unnecessary. There will be instant, there will be a percentage of instant deaths automatically from doing this. We already have enough documentation to show that the smallpox

vaccine, the one that we have, as safe as it is, it still will kill a certain percentage of the population. And if it's not for a real thing happening, let's not do this. And somehow the Bush administration actually backed down eventually at that. Now that's that's something I think is you talk about the anthrax attacks being memory hole. How did we forget about that? I would say the smallpox, you know, pandemic bioterror fears. It's like a memory hole within a memory hole within a memory hole. No one remembers this, but that was the direction they wanted to take us in. And luckily we didn't go there. But so I don't know if that answers your question, but that's that's what kind of came to mind for me. No, I mean, of course, the two main things that come to mind for me in terms of the impacts of this are the Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq.

These were the two major, both domestic and foreign policy, I mean, let's be frank, disasters of recent memory. And this had a pretty substantial impact on both of those going through. I mean, Iraq War would have happened anyway. The Patriot Act would have happened anyway. It's not like this completely changed history by saying, you know, if it wasn't for these anthrax attacks, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq. If it wasn't for the anthrax attacks, we wouldn't have the Patriot Act. We still would have the Patriot Act. We still would have invaded Iraq.

But this did quite a bit in terms of getting popular sentiment in favor of these two things, the Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq. And it did have an impact on some of these more, you know, squishy, moderate voices that were kind of hedging their bets on what to do a little bit. So I think is another way to word. I don't know if you would agree with that phrase, but I think it really helped manufacture consent for the Iraq war. Yeah, it was definitely a part of that. And like you said, Colin Powell at the UN, this is what was used as, you know,

one of the justifications for why we were going into Iraq. and this immortalized, infamous image of him at the United Nations. I think that those, even if it's only those two things, and of course there were kind of auxiliary effects like increased research and development of, you know, vaccines and treatments and increased spending for, you know, the CDC, for example, these things are, you know, kind of innocuous. But the two big impacts were the Patriot Act

in the invasion of Iraq. But none, anything that you want to say? Well, I mean, I think I agree with those are the two key things that were impactful. And as you point out, maybe they weren't completely decisive, but they certainly created the conditions to make it much easier for these things to pass or these actions to take place. And so that's a lasting legacy of this moment of fear. But I, you know, I wanted to go back maybe to that experience. you mentioned the one of the suspects i think was bruce ivan's and i guess he died in 2008 so there was

briefly some notice um of the case because of his association with it um we haven't really talked so much about why people have ignored it but maybe we should go back to you know how the investigation went i wondered if you had any you've been working on this uh robie and piecing together at least what the investigators did and all the, you know, kind of available evidence of who was targeted when and who was being, you know, investigated as a potential suspect. I'm just wondering if you have anything to say about, you know, what happened and what did we actually learn about it, even though the media hasn't paid much attention, you have. So, you know, what have you learned about, you know, about this event and what happened?

And just briefly, before Robbie speaks, I just want to reiterate the point that Robbie has really been digging in the latest episode. He even goes down into talking about this list you compiled of all of the registered addresses of all of the people that were even remotely associated with the anthrax attacks or 9-11. Like there was a lot of research that you've done here, Robbie. So, you know, I commend you for all of that. But anyway, take it away. I just wanted to clarify something. the list you're talking about, apparently this, this is a strange origin of where this list come from. It's called the Finn list. And it apparently comes from Finnish intelligence.

Now, what's strange about it is it seems like the U.S. government was passing around a list of like 120 addresses, suspects, information to various other intelligence agencies around the world after 9-11. Like, hey, help us out, guys. Here's a list of our suspects. Nobody knows for sure how this leaked. Nobody knows if someone put it online intentionally, but it appeared randomly in some unnamed directory, public directory, and someone grabbed it, and it's an insanely useful resource. I mean, it is every 9-11 suspects address, all their listed addresses, all of their known locations, phone numbers, including these alleged Israeli art students. It seemed like the U.S. government was looking at all this stuff as one big potential crime initially. And that's, I'm going to say this

before the anthrax attacks. What I've done is combine all those addresses with all the anthrax suspects and players and locations and put all that together to see what kind of leads that yields. And it's yielded some interesting, you know, connections that I didn't really consider before. But now I feel like I've almost forgotten your question. You were asking about the investigation itself and what I think, you know, what did we learn from the investigation Well, I'll just say up front, I don't think as the terms of the public, we haven't learned anything more in terms of like what actually happened. I'm not talking about the suspects or Ivan's or anything in terms of what actually

happened. Then we knew like two months after the attacks happened. But by that, what I mean is what the FBI already said and concluded as early as January 2002, that's pretty much the same like we haven't really learn anything honestly that much more useful beyond that and i know that sounds strange considering how much longer the investigation went on and how it's literally the most expensive most manpower of any FBI investigation in history now here's what's interesting initially the FBI was looking at the anthrax attacks as a much wider attack involving the coordination of multiple people and this can be

confirmed in several early anthrax books written by people who had inside access who were talking to FBI agents in the investigation. Now, the reason they thought this is because it wasn't just these four weaponized anthrax letters that were discovered that were sent from Trenton, New Jersey. It was also four letters that were sent from St. Petersburg, Florida that did not have real anthrax in them, but were sent seemingly in coordination with the... a real killer and by in coordination I mean to the same targets and within days of each other so whoever sent these st petersburg letters was either psychic they knew they had some kind of psychic link with some per another person doing this and they came up the exact same idea almost at the

exact same time you know incredible parallel thinking or it's not a coincidence and they were actually working together and they were coordinating some kind of hoax and real anthrax letter You know, both of them generate fear, the real and the fake, but you just double the fear, you know, because it's like it doesn't matter, you know, ultimately it doesn't matter. And really, the anthrax in those letters didn't kill the people the letters were addressed to. It, like I was saying before, the people who end up dying seemingly all random collateral damage, you know, people who got cross-contamination from somehow from the letters going through the mail system. So the FBI initially was looking at this as a conspiracy. involving multiple people in multiple states. Now, later on, much later on, when they're trying to jam a square peg into a circle hole, wherever you say, Bruce Ivins becomes their number one suspect. And they even have difficulty explaining how Bruce Ivins was able to go to Trenton, New Jersey, two times to send mail.

They struggle to even explain that missing time, because that's a seven-hour round trip from where Bruce Ivins was to this mailbox it was allegedly sent from. So having said that, that that's already difficult for the FBI to formulate that this happened, it makes it, it's basically impossible. The FBI would not be able to be like, okay, and then Bruce Evans also made two 29-hour round trips to St. Petersburg, Florida, because that's how long it would take to drive from Frederick Maryland to St. Petersburg, Florida, and back. So the FBI never even establish this. And in fact, the FBI actually erases from the narrative these St. Petersburg letters completely. And they almost pretend they don't exist, even though you can find plenty of evidence that they believe they were crucial to understanding the crime at the beginning. In fact, you can find plenty of evidence that that's what they used to go after Stephen Hatfield. And I haven't mentioned him yet. But he was a suspect that was initially targeted before Bruce Ivins.

who later won a $6 million settlement against the DOJ and other aspects of the U.S. government because John Ashcroft came out and said, we believe he's a person of interest. Now, I've talked to people who've, you know, dealt and who've been involved in various federal investigation before. And they've told me, you know what, that is a way for people to avoid liability, saying someone's a suspect, you know, that opens you up to liability. If they're not really a suspect, you're not ready to charge him and arrest him. You can't say that. You got to say something else. Okay. That's one maybe reason why John Ashcroft was stupid enough to blow, because I'll say this, I believe this, to blow the entire anthrax investigation by saying one thing in front of the cameras. You know,

it's believable. John Ashcroft was an idiot. He was the guy who wanted to cover up Lady Justice's boobs with a sheet or something. He's crazy, right? Well, here's another theory. What if he was told to blow the FBI investigation on purpose? and create such an insane roadblock than anything involving Stephen Hatfield or any evidence leading to him would have to be knocked out of the entire body of evidence. What if John Ashcroft was actually told to help blow the investigation? I think that's a theory we need to consider because taking a $6 million hit, is it really that big of a deal?

I don't think so. And I think $6 million is really cheap, actually, for being able to blow the anthrax investigation and just kind of move on from it. Now, I know this sounds maybe a little bit weird to people are, listening to who because I would say just for the record most people on the left and in the anti-war sort of anti-imperialist movement have sort of taken the Stephen Hatfield as innocent you know wronged guy targeted guy they really railroaded him and that's the narrative that I think most of those people believe and I frankly believe that for a long time um I think

that that's an oversimplifying narrative and I think a lot we need to go back and really look at what happened because regardless of what you believe the Stephen Hatfield lawsuit and settlement essentially erases and creates like, you know, you're looking at like a leaked classified document, right? Well, there's always sections in those documents, well, not the leaked ones, but, you know, the ones they officially release where there's a giant black redacted part of it where you're like, okay, what is what's in here? I don't really have the full context. Well, unfortunately, that's where we're left with the anthrax investigation because a lawsuit and settlement essentially did something to a large body of what

the FBI's evidence trail was in what case they were making because they're never going to talk about that again because they got sued for it. Other family members took settlement money too. So there, you know, and in fact, Bob Stevens' wife, his family, took settlement money based on the idea that the government was negligent for letting Bruce Ivans take the anthrax and send it through the mail. Well, unfortunately, evens was the first person to die from anthrax. We should mention for listeners who are unaware. Yeah. Robert Stevens was the guy who worked at AMI. And in fact, I mean, that's the one thing about this investigation you asked. What did we learn? Well, they still don't know how he got, the first antics victim, they still really don't know how he died from it. And that's to me fascinating because, you know, all these other attacks apparently came from letters. But then when you really get into the granularity of it, you have to ask yourself, well, how do they know 100% for sure that these people died from cross-contamination, letters they really actually don't and it is mostly a it's sort of like an educated guess that

makes sense with the available evidence it's a circumstantial case at best there is no forensic from for almost all these deaths there's no forensic evidence that that's what killed them you know they could say well there are spores found here and here well the last two deaths of anthrax there were no spores found anywhere on their person in their home in their mailbox so you know it gets really confusing about what the FBI is actually saying happen, but I guess to make a long story short, very early on, even before the Stephen Hadfield lawsuit happened, they wanted to cinch this up into a nice package, into a neat little package without really telling us what was going on. And I think that that's actually evident at the very beginning, because you

can find special agent Barimann and New York saying, yeah, we think these St. Petersburg letters and the Trenton, New Jersey letters are related. And then within a week, you have Robert Mueller coming out and saying, here's the only four letters. Can you help us identify the handwriting? Well, that's a little bit strange, considering that just a week earlier, they were saying the St. Petersburg letters were part of the attacks.

Why are they only showing us those four letters? So they're already very quickly, for some reason, wanting to hide or bury that part of the evidence trail, even though they follow up on it and search Stephen Hed. It's property, apparently, based on these St. Petersburg letters. So they were using them as a lead, but they wanted to hide them from the public, which I find kind of fascinating. And unfortunately, we've only seen one of those hoaxed St. Petersburg letters envelopes,

only one of them, even though there were four of them. We haven't seen any of the letters inside the envelope. We've only seen one of the envelopes. And to me, I'm not a handwriting expert. I can't say that the handwriting matches, but I can't say it looks like whoever did it, was trying to write in a very similar style of handwriting, which is just odd. The sort of slanted block letters, line by line, you know, again, it speaks to coordination. It speaks to something that's not just a coincidence.

So I feel like I kind of went off on multiple chances. I do not know if I actually answered your question there. Sorry. No, I just, I think the point is that there's still so many mysteries around it because, there just hasn't been a continuing interest in really explaining it. It sort of closed off a lot of the questions that could have been raised. It seems like it served its purpose in the moment of being exploited in the moment of fear, panic, and paranoia politically for the Patriot Act and for the Iraq War.

And that subsequently, nobody has really been that interested to continue to pursue. You mentioned that it was a very expensive investigation, but it just seems like it did not ever really come out with conclusive reports or conclusions, really, and it's just been dropped. So it's hard to say what exactly is the outcome of this and whether there will be any continue. This is the 20th anniversary, so it's a good opportunity to reflect back on that moment and on that, on that, era, but it's hard to see if there's really any interest anywhere in trying to find out what actually happened. And you point out there are a bunch of roadblocks and open questions here. And the evidence hasn't really been publicly presented in the way that you would have expected for such an important, you know, unexplained set of crimes. You know, yeah, so that's

very mysterious. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm a little, even though it's everything you're saying is true. You know, it's been 20 years. I feel like I'm one of the only people that still cares about this and is looking into it. So it is, it is depressing in that way. But I'm also excited that I do think, you know, with time, you know, there's a potential of maybe there's a whistleblower on the inside who feels more comfortable now talking. I mean, I don't know if you, you caught this at the beginning of my last podcast about the AMI, Rudy Giuliani Antthrax Cleanup, which is a whole other rabbit hole.

A top FBI guy who was the assistance director of the FBI seems finally ready, comfortable to just straight out say that he thinks Rudy Giuliani's anthrax cleanup contract is really suspicious. And it's like, well, who else thought that in the FBI? Who else? What else did they know? You know, like, because that's to me is really intriguing. to me it speaks to this idea that yeah these people are feds a lot of them are dirty a lot of them

just carry water but some of the people on the inside have to know that this was a cover-up the most expensive the most manpower ever spent on an fbi investigation and it led to this crap conclusion i guarantee you there are hundreds of people in the fbi at least maybe thousands who know for sure this was a cover-up and are just like well what are you going to do it's like you know i mean I would guarantee that. So I'm hopeful that maybe eventually we'll get some kind of whistleblower. We already know Richard Lambert. I think is his name Richard Lambert?

He was a top guy in the FBI investigation eventually, and he ended up suing the government for stovepiping evidence and creating the false impression that Bruce Ivins was guilty and their executive summary, their report that they eventually released. Now, the FBI and DOJ really only have a circumstance, case against Bruce Ivins. And they will actually admit that because their forensic evidence, physical evidence actually was shown to be not really, didn't stand up to scrutiny after the National

Academy of Sciences looked it over and wrote their own report based off of it. And they basically said the FBI, this is not usable evidence. So the FBI is really only left with a circumstantial case remaining. but the circumstantial case that they show is basically the, you know, it's one of the most ultimate forms of lie of omission you've ever seen. It's not just that they do lies of omission to show you that Bruce Ivan seems guilty. They omit so many other things from the case itself that it's actually baffling. They only spent a couple sentences on Robert Stevens dying from anthrax. They don't even really explain how he died. In fact, they're saying Bruce

Ivan's killed these five people, well, at least three of the victims, they don't even have anything explaining how Bruce Evans is responsible for their deaths. Just this vague idea, well, they died from anthrax. So it must have been from the anthrax Ivan sent out through the mail because it's the same strain. Well, that's like, I mean, it's really weak evidence. And that's the best they come up with in their report. And I think, unfortunately, you know, some of the best stuff we have out there right now is probably these lawsuits, you know, the Richard Lambert lawsuit, we can really see what he's talking about, what he believes was, you know, routed away from the evidence that was omitted from the investigation. And then we also have the, basically the statements

of a whistleblower who did drone intelligence work for the U.S. military named Matt DeHart. Now, this is something that I haven't covered recently because it's it's a to me it's a separate thing where it's basically this whistleblower he got involved in sort of wiki leak style uh document leaking and he ran for a while this shell where people could upload documents that could be leaked um and he was involved in anonymous you know the hacking group for a while and matt to heart claims that an FBI whistleblower actually uploaded a dearth of documents to his shell where the FBI whistleblower was basically saying these documents proved that the CIA did anthrax. Now, unfortunately, these documents were confiscated by the Canadian authorities when Matt

to Hart tried to flee the country. We still don't know what happened to these documents. Matt to Hart's, I've spoken to Matt to Hart. He tried to explain to me as best as possible what he saw from prison. I talked to him over the phone when he was in prison, and he, you know, he tried to recollect as many details as he could from these documents. His mom on camera in a recent documentary, he tries to as well. She believes the CIA is behind the anthrax attack.

She's seen these documents, and she seems rather believable to me. Now, there have been some problems and some of the believability in other parts of his story that's allowed people to poke holes in what he's saying. Um, but there's actually a documentary out right now called an enemy of the state, uh, that's all about Matt to heart. And it's a little bit, I'm a little bit, feel a little bit but hurt or burned over this because they used like a significant portion of my interview with him. Uh, in this documentary, they never contacted me.

They really gave me a preview copy. They still don't even give me a copy, which is sort of, I don't know, a little insulting for them to use a part of my podcast and investigation and refuse to let me see the movie without paying money for it. But, um, anyway. that so that's a little bit heartening even though they didn't they didn't give me any credit they didn't give me a free preview copy at least someone is still doing work on this and is digging into this um and i do think mad to heart story is important and and yeah i mean who what would be

one agency if one government agency was involved in this who could have gone away with it i mean cia is one potential candidate we also know that the cia works with betel which is a private military contractor that is one of the only private military contractors that deals with anthrax and that has that had some storages of anthrax and other biological materials so there's a lot of stuff to unpack there i don't know if that really answer your question but i'm simultaneously depressed and heartened with where this thing is now um but i think that you know i guess i'm excited that i feel like i found enough new things that even though there's not you know, people clamoring, you know, calling me on the phone and being like, how do I get involved

in this? I've already had enough, you know, excitement where I'm like, oh, I like some guy, one of our patron subscribers, like spent a whole day going to different places in St. Petersburg for us and asking for various documents and trying to talk to people. So like, I've never had that level of excitement. Like, like, I do think people are interested in this. I don't think people are curious and eager to find out what happened. It's just kind of like going. up against a glacier, you know, as Kurt Vonnegut says in the opening to Slaughterhouse Five. It's like, what do you do when you really, this case, you know, it seems small. It's only five people who died or whatever, but it really is sort of like a monolith. It's, and you kind of

just can chip away at it. So, yeah, I don't know if I really answered you there. Sorry. That's okay. Adnan, do you have anything else? Should I go to my final question? Go ahead, Henry. Okay. So just before I ask the question, I just want to mention people may have heard of Stephen Hatfield relatively recently in the news. So as Robbie pointed out, he was the original person of interest in this case and won this big settlement. But recently he's also been in the news because during the tail end of the Trump administration, he was one of the key people in the Trump administration's COVID response. And he was one of the big talking heads for hydroxychlorical. is a potential treatment for COVID, which listeners, if you're listening, hydroxychloroquine is absolutely not a treatment for COVID. It has no positive effects based on many, many meta-analyses. And in fact, most of the meta-analyses have shown that it actually has detrimental effects to people that have COVID.

But, you know, never stop the Trump administration from saying hydroxychloroquine. This is the way to go. Second point that I want to make, you mentioned the National Academy of Science his findings regarding Ivan's, and just to clear this up for listeners who are wondering a little bit more about that. So the FBI found that the strain of anthrax that was used was the AIMS strain, which Bruce Ivins, yes, had access to. That's why he was the suspect, and eventually who the FBI said was this lone perpetrator

of this act. But the FBI also said that they had genetic, genetic. that would show that not only was it the same strain, but it was the same bacteria that came from the fridge of Bruce Ivins. You know, genetically, they were able to link it together that the anthrax that the people died from and the anthrax in the fridge of Bruce Ivins. The National Academy of Science is finding this is several years after the fact. They found that the FBI actually had more or less been fabricating that second point.

Like, yes, it was the aim strain. Yes, that is the strain that Bruce Evans had access to, but that genetic information that they were saying was the smoking gun, you know, it was the anthrax in his fridge, actually was not strong, nearly strong enough to say that that was that anthrax from that fridge. It could have been, it was the same strain, but the genetic information that they had was not nearly strong enough to actually fingerprint that anthrax from the individuals and say, this is exactly what fridge the same strain. anthrax came from. But by that point, as we've kind of been alluding to, the media had basically lost all interest in this case. And so once the case was wrapped up, more or less, Ivan's committed suicide in 2008. The media forgot about it. And so when the National Academy of Science has put out this finding, which I think was in 2010, am I right on that, Robbie? Something like that. 2012 or 10. It was somewhere around there, yeah. Something like that. By that point, the media had

completely forgotten about it. So even though you'd think that this would be big news, like, oh, the FBI is trumping up their information saying that it's much more concrete than it actually is. And now we actually have a scientific analysis showing that it was not nearly as strong as it was. At the invitation of the FBI, the FBI told the National Academy of Sciences to look at it, and they said, no, it's not. That seems like it would be big news, but it really wasn't. I mean, it was reported on a little bit, but not nearly as much as you would think. think that this, you know, potentially big scandal at the FBI would be. But my last question, go ahead, go ahead. I think that's partly because the FBI, even though they did have a, you know,

a piece of supposed physical forensic evidence that they said linked to Ivan's to the crime, they really leaned into the circumstantial case about him being a stalker that stocked this sorority to sort of, I do think that that was, you know, that's important when you're trying to, It's just like when they, you know, a black teenager dies in a police shooting and what kind of picture do they usually put up on, you know, on the news. It's usually a picture of him looking kind of a little scarier, like, not like, you know, usually not smiling or is wearing like a backwards hat or, you know, so it's like the media is really good.

And I think the FBI knew that really leaning to the story that Ivan's was a creep. He might have been a stalker. In fact, he might have even chosen the mailbox based on his obsession with the sorority was what they really leaned into, they were counting on, you know, and I think the fact that they even just ran with their conclusions before the NAS was even finished says a lot. It's like they didn't even care. You know, they hired the NAS to do that. And then they're like, ah, fuck it, let's just run with this. Because we don't, we're fine with just pushing this. It's already dead. You know, this is our conclusion. And I think that that's where they went with it. And it's fascinating, actually.

there's so many weird circumstantial things that they try to tie ivan to the crime with that i haven't even unpacked yet and one of those specifically is something that i'm personally not i'm a little slow when it comes to puzzles and and i don't even know the freaking word what are the zodiac ciphers i'm i'm slow when it comes to understanding stuff like this so the last thing i want to tackle is this thing that the fbi and other people who are a little more clever than me really lean on which is this idea that, no, we know it's Ivan's because he put Goldel Escherbach cipher in the letters, and he was obsessed with Goldel Escherbach, and he used this cipher before. That's one piece of evidence that a lot of people lean on.

I don't, it doesn't seem convincing to me, but at the same time, I don't fully understand how they have deduced this. But this is actually in the FBI's report as well. And just in general that he was mentally unstable. that he wanted to be violent towards his coworkers. That's a lot of what they pump into this report. But I have to say, it's, I mean, it's clearly cherry-picked. I mean, there's no, you don't even have to know that Lambert said this was stovepipe to

see it yourself. It's clearly, they've cherry-picked whatever evidence they can to make it seem like Bruce Evans is as crazy as possible, as creepy as possible. And you know what? At the end of the day, it's really not that convincing. I mean, sure, he seems like he was mentally unstable. I'll give you that. But a lot of people in this country are mentally unstable.

That is not enough to build a circumstantial case. The only person who really came out and said, hey, he said he's going to kill some of his coworkers and he's violent was a person who had a drunk driving, like conviction floating over their head. It was like a DUI that could have given them potential jail time. So basically you have someone who was compromised by the law. who probably cut a deal with the FBI or someone else and just handed them something about Ivans that, I mean, do we really know that's true? She's the only one who said it. So at the

end of the day, it's really sad what they've done to Ivan's. You know, certain aspects of what you can see in the case files makes it seem like, yeah, maybe he had something to do with this, but it's a very weak, you know, a possibility. And even if, even if you come to the conclusion that he was involved somehow, I think would you look at all the evidence in the case, you have to basically come in the conclusion that other people were too. And I personally don't believe that. I don't think there's any real evidence to show that Ivans was involved. But one thing I wanted to say to one of the points you brought up is the NAS says this evidence is bunk. Now, a lot of people don't realize that Bruce Ivins actually gave the FBI a flask with anthrax spores for them to

like use as comparison because at this point apparently someone had told the iowa university of iowa to destroy their aim strain library or their anthrax spore sample database like within a week after the attacks which is a weird thing to do considering that if we know it's the aim strain then maybe we should have that database around they they destroyed it um but bruce ivan's oddly you know this actually happens in a lot of these different different with a lot of these different characters in the case he had no spores anywhere in his private property in his home in his vehicle even on his desk like at the lab that's what's so fascinating is like he I mean either he was the most immaculate you know killer ever and

and was super clean and made sure not to show like drag any traces of spores anywhere or he's not guilty I mean so it's like you got to it's it really when you really get into the details of this, a lot of things just simply do not make sense. The FBI is saying, oh yeah, he handed us the murder weapon. What an idiot. And it's the, and it's proof that he sent the Antax. It sounds like quite an idiotic thing to do for someone who was so clean. There wasn't even the microscopic trace of any spores anywhere in his home or car or anything. I mean, come on. Like, it just doesn't make sense. So. And just talking about cherry picking information to include in reports, both by the FBI and the news, I recall seeing something.

where one of the circumstantial pieces of evidence against Bruce Ivans was that Senators Dashel and Leahy are both pro-choice and Bruce Ivins is a Catholic. That was one of the pieces of information. He's a Catholic, they're pro-choice, therefore anthrax. Like this is one of the, I do recall seeing this. So, Robbie, we're just about out of time, but I want to make sure that I give you maybe two minutes on this point. We've talked about the inadequacy of the investment.

We've talked about the inadequacy of the reporting. You've done a lot of digging here, a lot of digging. What would you say would be the avenues that need to be explored further within this case? Maybe we'll never actually know who did it. But what are the avenues that need to be explored more by people that have more resources or more access than somebody like you who's doing what you can? Well, I think probably around this anniversary, I discovered the St. Petersburg letters for the first time. And the fact that I've been looking at this for 10 years and I had just first heard of that, it was pretty shocking to me.

And so my impression of at the beginning was, wow, there's like some stuff in here that, you know, has been sort of memory hold within the actual framework of this investigation. But then once I realized that the FBI was looking at the St. Petersburg letters as part of the crime, and once I saw one of the envelopes myself, and I'm like, this looks like, looks kind of like one of the anthrax letters. I think at this point, that is one of the most important avenues that we could actually maybe make a dent in in terms of does anybody have a copy of any of these letters or envelopes anywhere, and are they sitting on them right now? because there's plenty of statements out there that implies that many other people have seen these outside of law enforcement. That gives me some hope that there's somewhere out there, that the FBI or law enforcement did not manage to confiscate and get back any copy they could. The fact that that Howard Troxler envelope was published in the St. Petersburg Times, I think is really, really lucky because they evidently took that and the letter and hit it. We haven't seen their actual copy of it, even though they've freely distributed copies of all the Trenton, New Jersey letters.

I think that that's a really important avenue. And I think we need to see exactly what those letters said and what the handwriting looks like on them. And, you know, get a handwriting analyst to just give a definitive yes or no of this hand, if the handwriting on the St. Petersburg letters matches with Trenton, New Jersey. Either answer would be useful. If they don't match and there's. no way that the same person could have written them, then to me, that means that this is, that's clear evidence that there was coordination involving multiple people.

Now, if they do match, then that means that the FBI, like, lied so much through their teeth that for some reason they didn't, they, that's a little bit more of a mysterious thing if they do match, because it's like, well, then that's a, they really been covering that up, you know, like that's, so there's, there's, I think there's, there's, it could be interesting leads yielded from that, getting a handwriting analyst. finding anybody else who may have seen these letters or still has copies of the St. Petersburg hoax letters because at one time the FBI believed they were part of the overall crime. The other area of investigation I think we need to pursue is talking to any victim's family members

who are still willing to talk. The problem is a lot of them have taken settlement money. So what they are able to say, what they're willing to say, you know, they might have their hands, tied in some way. I personally spoke to Howard Troxler, who received a hoax letter. He didn't take settlement money, but I found that it was difficult to get him to want to take interest in this, even though he agreed with me, by the end of my conversation, he fully agreed with me, yeah, this is probably part of the same crime. Yeah, it was probably targeted by either the conspiracy of people who were behind the overall crime or the same person who did the real crime. Now, for me personally, if someone told me that 20 years later, I'd be like, okay, that's

really serious. Now I'm listening. Now I'm interested. I want to make sure I, you know, keep up to date on any new details that come in. Unfortunately, his reaction was more the opposite. He was more like, I believe you, your evidence is convincing, but I don't want to know. And unfortunately, I think that we're dealing with a, I mean, not to pass any judgment on Howard, but I think people are still afraid. And I do think that the anthrax letters, in a sort of an unconscious way, created us a form, maybe Stockholm syndrome is the wrong word. But we have to remember, these were targeted at journalists during a state of intense fear after 9-11. How does that play out psychologically for the rest of these people's lives? I mean, you really have to ask yourself, are those people

going to dig into the anthrax attacks? Especially what if a lot of those people? And, you know, people in the Beltway, I don't think a lot of people realize this happened to be some real conspiratorial people in private. I mean, I was just talking to someone who worked for an aide, worked as an aide for a very famous senator. And one of the first weeks he was working with him, the guy was talking about people putting poison in his coffee, all these different paranoid thoughts he was having. So the point I'm trying to make here is that I think that there are a lot of people in D.C. and the journalistic class who know that Bruce Evans didn't do this. They just know it in their gut. They were,

I mean, you watch the press conference where the FBI, like, tries to, you know, give their final case. And most of the people in the press corps are just like, what? Like, these are generic DC reporters who all of them clearly don't believe this. So what did they do with those feelings? What do they do with those thoughts? Well, you know, I think they're just somewhere buried inside and maybe on some unconscious level. A lot of people are afraid to dig into this because maybe intuitively they understand that whoever did this, have had access to powerful, you know, high-level government facilities, and they've been protected.

And they're still out there if they haven't died already from natural causes. Those are scary things to contemplate that somehow our entire system protected a bioweapon, a biological terrorist or terrorists for some reason. And I mean, it's scary, I think, to really think about the implications of what that means. You know, we talk all the time about how Russia and Putin is so heavy-handed with his totalitarianism that he wants to put his signature on the poisons that he kills his critics with. Well, I'm sorry, but, you know, that to me sounds a little bit like a cartoon. What's scarier to me is how we live in a country where we, there's this sort of like gray area and ambiguity where it's like, wait, do all these journalists also

think that this was an inside job and that the person who did it is still free? Are they scared? like I like that chills me more than all these stories we hear about you know what Putin is supposedly doing to his critics that ambiguity that you don't know where the line is you don't know which line you'll cross where you'll act maybe something will come down raining upon down on your head that you know you will not expect and i mean it's just i think this is part of the problem it's like you know and i have to admit it's sometimes during my because i've gone out on such a limb on this and there's not many other people doing it i've gotten a bit afraid at times of like, well, what if there's someone out there who really doesn't want this uncovered and what power do they have to wield?

So, you know, I try not to go there, but I do think it's a real thing to consider. And it should not be like looked at as a, as something lightly or like this is just like a hobby, you know, for people to research. It's serious. And this, I think, is still unsolved. And the consequences and the implications of it are, you know, I think our would could pivot our country historic, like in a different direction on the historical timeline. And I think there's a really good reason why this has been a memory hold. So to answer your question at the very beginning, I don't know how they've done it, but I think it's for a very good reason why this has sort of been buried because it had

its usefulness. It already was used to the maximum extent. But the actual facts of what happened and sort of the story of it, that's not useful anymore because it's just doesn't make sense. I mean, you can't, it's, you don't want people looking into that. So I know what I'm saying, awfully conspiratorial right now, but that's, um, that's really, where I go with it. Listeners are, again, our guest was Robbie Martin from Media Roots Radio. Robbie, can you tell the listeners how they can find you and Media Roots Radio? Yeah, we're on, um, we're on all the podcast platforms for the most part.

Um, you can, you can find us on iTunes or Spreaker or, pod bean any of those places just look for media roots radio um we put out four episodes a month and uh you can find me on twitter or uh i think that's probably the only place i really do anything besides media roots now um at fluorescent gray is my twitter handle um that's pretty much it excellent adnan can you tell the listeners how they can find you on twitter and your other podcast. Sure. You can follow me on Twitter at Adnan-A-Husain-H-U-S-A-I-N. And if you're interested in Middle East Islamic World, Muslim diasporic culture, I also host a podcast called the M-A-J-L-I-S. It's on all the platforms and so on. And I just would like to, again, thank Robbie for all the

work that he's doing of historical investigation. It's not easy to dig up when the evidence isn't being really readily available, but it sounds like more and more there are opportunities to find out what happened. But regardless of how that all gets resolved, it's clearly the historical impact and significance of this whole episode was very relevant to two major shifts in American history domestically with the Patriot Act and, you know, the fear and panic that attended the argument made for the Iraq War. And I especially like that through line about how when we were talking about WMD is very palpable and present in everyone's imagination was the direct connection with anthrax, that that's what it was about. So regardless of, you know,

what will come in terms of answers eventually, it's been 20 years, we can look back and say that this was a very significant episode for the reasons that you've been explaining. So thanks so much, Robbie. Oh, thank you guys so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. Listeners, you can find me at Huck 1995, H-U-C-K-1-995. You can find guerrilla history on Twitter at Gorilla-U-R-R-I-L-A-U-Sk, that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Sk, and you can support the show by joining us on

Patreon at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history. Again, that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Until next time, listeners, solidarity. I'm going to be able to be.