The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy

received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University and taught in the Religious Studies Department of McMaster University for 30 years. While at McMaster he became founding Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster, after which he helped develop the B.A. program in Peace Studies and oversaw the development of peace-building projects in Sri Lanka, Gaza, Croatia and Afghanistan. Graeme was a member of the organizing committee of the Toronto Hearings held on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and is co-editor of The Journal of 9/11 Studies.

The anthrax letter attacks occurred from September through November of 2001, killing five and wounding many. The attacks were widely held to be the work of Muslims and were used to support the invasion of Afghanistan and, later, the invasion of Iraq. They were used explicitly and repeatedly to justify the passing of the Patriot Act. They were also meant to support withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, a withdrawal eagerly sought by the neoconservatives associated with the Project for a New American Century who wished to pursue their global agenda without obstruction from small states with WMD. In the early days of the attacks there were several perpetrator hypotheses in play. One that gained prominence was the Double Perpetrator hypothesis according to which Iraq had supplied the sophisticated anthrax spores while al-Qaeda had supplied the foot soldiers responsible for preparing and sending the letters. This hypothesis was eagerly reported by the mainstream media. It came to grief quickly when scientists discovered that the anthrax spores had a domestic source and appeared to come from the heart of the US military and intelligence communities. The FBI rapidly began a search for "the anthrax killer," promoting the idea that there was a lone wolf perpetrator within the military community--a renegade, an unbalanced person whose behavior revealed nothing of significance about structures and institutions of the deep state. In 2008 the Bureau named Dr. Bruce Ivins of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases as the "anthrax killer." Ivins had conveniently died a week before being named and could not fight back in court. Ivins remains the FBI's choice to this day: the case was closed in 2010. This book support with a great deal of evidence the following four assertions: (a) the anthrax letter attacks were carried out by a group of perpetrators, not by a "lone wolf;" (b) the group that perpetrated this crime was composed, in whole or in part, of deep insiders within the U.S. state apparatus; (c) these insiders were connected to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks; (d) the anthrax attacks were meant to play an important role in the strategy of redefinition through which the Cold War was replaced by a new global conflict framework, the Global War on Terror.