BY NORM DIXON
The fear of "bio-terrorism" in the United States is being cynically used to whip up war fever by politicians, the "attack Iraq" faction of the US administration and the mass media in the wake of the deaths of a Florida media worker on October 5 and two postal workers in Washington, DC, on October 22.
The confusion, fear and hysteria caused by the anthrax letters have provided US rulers with another opportunity to buttress public support for the US government's war against Afghanistan, at a time when graphic footage of widespread civilian casualties is beginning to be broadcast. It also coincides with the first body bags containing US soldiers killed in the war arriving home.
The workers died from pulmonary (or inhaled) anthrax after being exposed to letters contaminated with anthrax bacteria. Three other people who were exposed to the letters have been diagnosed with pulmonary anthrax but are recovering. Pulmonary anthrax is the most dangerous form of anthrax infection.
At least six other people contracted the less harmful, easily treated skin infection form of the disease (cutaneous anthrax).
Tests on thousands of people who may have come into contact with the letters — postal workers, those employed in the offices targeted or who may have visited the affected buildings — indicate that another 37 people may have been exposed to anthrax bacteria but have not developed the disease.
Most of the infections can be traced to a handful of poisoned letters that travelled through the US postal system between mid-September and early October.
The three letters found so far began their journey in Trenton, New Jersey, between September 18 and October 9. One was addressed to NBC news reader Tom Brokaw in New York, one to the New York Post and one to Democrat Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. The anthrax infections in New Jersey and Washington, DC, and many of those in New York City, are on the route these letters took.
Unlocated tainted letters sent to the CBS and ABC media corporations' New York offices explain the one cutaneous anthrax infection in each office. A poisoned letter, which was apparently thrown away, is also suspected to have infected the two employees at American Media, one of whom, a photo editor, died from the disease.
War fever
Exploiting the fear prompted by these criminal acts, US politicians, government officials, media "commentators" and "experts" for hire have cynically set out to incite public panic with contradictory, exaggerated and false information about the danger that the disease poses, and the scale and sophistication of the anthrax attacks.
While Republican and Democrat politicians loudly insisted that the anthrax was "weapons-grade" and "weaponised", health experts and investigators denied that the germs had been genetically engineered to resist antibiotics or treated to make them more easily inhaled.
As the panic intensified, politicians fuelled it further by warning that terrorists may soon spread smallpox or poison the country's food supplies.
Politicians and US administration officials, without any evidence, sought to tie the anthrax attacks to Osama bin Laden and/or Iraq.
US President George Bush said on October 15 that "there may be some possible link" between the anthrax letters and bin Laden: "I wouldn't out it past him, but we don't have any hard evidence".
The panic that ensued has resulted in thousands of false alarms and hoaxes across the US and throughout the world. The appearance of the smallest trace of a powdery substance — whether leaking from envelopes or found on floors or benches — has been enough to evacuate workplaces, stop trains and divert planes. Among the substances that have triggered emergency responses are instant pudding mix, talcum powder, confetti and powdered sugar from a doughnut.
Pharmacies and doctors have been besieged by tens of thousands of people demanding the antibiotic Cipro. Unscrupulous internet suppliers of the drug have made a killing. Health professionals have warned that the huge number of people taking these preparations without good reason may lead to new generations of antibiotic-resistant germs that could cost thousands of lives in the future.
The capitalist mass media has fanned the panic. Article after article described anthrax as "one of the most feared diseases known to man" and stated that, unless treated before the symptoms appeared, pulmonary anthrax was almost always fatal.
News reports regularly did not differentiate between the pulmonary and cutaneous anthrax infections; every exposure to the anthrax bug became a "case". Each scare and hoax was reported in fine detail and with screaming headlines. Little wonder the world began to believe that thousands had received a death sentence.
As soon as the news broke of the first anthrax death, US newspapers and TV networks immediately sought to find "links", no matter how tenuous or ridiculous, with the hijackers thought responsible for the September 11 outrages.
The "evidence" included that some of the 19 suspects had lived in Florida at some time; two hijackers took flying lessons "less than 60 miles" from St Petersburg, Florida (many newspapers incorrectly reported that the NBC-destined letter was posted from there); some of the hijackers subscribed to newspapers published by American Media; some hijackers had lived in New Jersey; and so too did some of those convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The fact that the letters were posted after the hijackers met their fiery deaths did not sway the mass media from highlighting such "links". The FBI could find no traces of anthrax at the apartments or in the belongings of the suspected hijackers or others detained in the dragnet that followed September 11.
On October 13, headlines across the US bellowed that Nevada state officials had "confirmed" that a letter posted in Malaysia to a Microsoft office in Nevada was tainted with anthrax. Reporters scrambled to find Malaysian "links" with bin Laden.
A prime example was the October 14 Washington Post, which reported, "The letter to Nevada was postmarked in Malaysia and the letter to NBC was postmarked in Trenton. Both places are believed to have relatively heavy concentrations of operatives and supporters of Osama bin Laden, intelligence experts said. Jersey City was the cradle of the plot to bomb the World Trade Centre in 1993. And bin Laden associates met in Kuala Lumpur ... in January 2000."
For days, every detail of the Microsoft "anthrax attack" was reported — then silence. The Malaysian letter turned out to be anthrax-free, and it was discreetly dropped.
The media scoured the world for more anthrax mail attacks. Two incidents — a letter to the New York Times' Rio bureau and a parcel delivered to a US businessperson in Kenya — were widely reported to have tested "positive" for the bug. In both cases, the reports were false. The Kenyan parcel had a bad case of mildew.
Danger
Without doubt, the cold-blooded, random murder of three workers, and the attempted murder of many others, by a serial killer using anthrax infection as a weapon is a heinous crime.
But the danger of sudden death from anthrax — even if deliberately spread — is minuscule. In the United States, more than 200,000 people died of the many forms of non-anthrax pulmonary disease in 1998, including 18,361 from tuberculosis.
While anthrax is a dangerous disease, there is no danger of it developing into an epidemic. It cannot be passed from human to human and most strains respond to common antibiotics. Bright sunlight kills it.
In its unaltered form, anthrax bacteria tend to form into clumps that fall to the ground. Even if the clumps are inhaled, they are usually too big to evade the body's immune system (which is not say that cannot happen: 700-1000 people worldwide die from anthrax each year and the last reported US death from pulmonary anthrax was 25 years ago).
Despite the desperate attempts to link the attacks to Osama bin Laden or Iraq, all the available evidence points to a lone perpetrator rather than a "terrorist" conspiracy.
The letters to NBC and the New York Post were written in almost identical handwriting, were worded virtually the same and even shared common misspellings. Both included the words "Death to America", "Death to Israel" and "Allah is Great".
The hand-written, block-lettered addresses on the NBC, New York Post and the Daschle envelopes also matched. All three had "09-11-01" scrawled on them. The same distinctive strain of anthrax was found in the NBC and Daschle letters, and at the Florida office of American Media.
In all the column-kilometres and hundreds of hours of air-time that have been devoted to the anthrax assaults, the capitalist mass media has studiously avoided discussing the most likely culprit of the attacks — the US far right.
The US extreme right has long had a very public love affair with threats of biological warfare. US abortion clinics every year have reported dozens of mailed anthrax threats. On October 15 alone, around 110 abortion clinics and advice centres received envelopes in the mail containing white powder, some mentioning anthrax.
In 1998, two men were arrested in Nevada with large quantities of what was thought to be anthrax germs. One of the men, Larry Wayne Harris, was a registered microbiologist and a member of the white supremacist Aryan Nations group. The other, William Leavitt, was a Mormon fundamentalist and an owner of biomedical labs. The substance Harris and Leavitt had was found to be anthrax vaccine.
In 1995, Harris was arrested with vials of bubonic-plague bacteria. He had paid $240 for them and they were delivered by Federal Express courier from the American Type Culture Collection.
At his trial, the prosecution charged that he threatened to release the germs in the New York subway. He was found guilty of mail fraud and banned from "conducting any experiment with or obtaining any infectious diseases, bacteria or germs".
Harris is also the author of a book on bacteriological warfare that includes details of how to culture biological agents. Harris also claims to have worked for the CIA in the 1980s and trained Iraqi scientists in biological weapons production. Iraq was a US ally at the time.