Anthrax, Again
The NYT has what they bill as the most comprehensive profile of the alleged anthrax killer yet.
Before I get into the important new details from the profile, can you help me with this detail? This is billed as a comprehensive profile. Yet when the NYT gets around to describing the attacks, here’s what they say:
Days later came word of the anthrax letters. First, the death of a tabloid photo editor in Florida, Robert Stevens. Then the poison letters mailed to NBC News and The New York Post with notes declaring “Death to America! Death to Israel!”
And finally the letters to Senators Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, spewing deadly spores through the postal system and across official Washington.
Particularly given that one of the biggest unexplained details of the "attacks" is how, right after the last attack and just a month and a half after Judy reported on a more potent anthrax program, Judy got an envelope full of fake anthrax. Don’t you think the NYT could have mentioned those details?
Nevermind–we know how they like to pretend Judy never existed.
Speaking of which, one detail I was previously unaware of is that the Army quashed an investigation led by Ft. Detrick’s own scientists.
When institute scientists began their own review of the evidence, nervous Army officials ordered the inquiry dropped.
That, too, seems worth more detail.
The story also reveals more details about the fibers found on the envelopes sent to victims–yet virtually unmentioned in the FBI’s limited releases about Ivins.
Meticulous study of tiny brown fibers found stuck to the envelopes led nowhere.
Those are the brown fibers that didn’t match Ivins’ own hair, nor any of his clothes that the FBI carted away from his house.
And it turns out that Ivins testified before a grand jury in 2007.
In May 2007, Dr. Ivins — assured by prosecutors that he was not a target of the investigation — testified under oath to a grand jury on two consecutive days. He answered all the questions about anthrax. Only once did he plead his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, when he was asked about his secret interest in sororities.
Given the timing, I’d be curious why over a year passed and they got no closer to Ivins.
But the biggest revelation of the story is that the most dubious (IMO) theory of the case came from the woman who first pitched Ivins as a suspect. You’ll recall that the only logic the FBI offered for why Ivins would twice drive to Princeton to mail anthrax is that the mailbox was on the same street as an office for a sorority that he obsessed about?
Well, the person who first suggested he might be responsible did so, partly, based on her allegation that Ivins had stalked her because of her affiliation with the same sorority. That person is Nancy Haigwood, who knew Ivins from grad school at UNC.
There was more to Bruce Ivins than his Army colleagues imagined, and Nancy Haigwood knew it.
She met him in 1976 in the biology department at the University of North Carolina, where he was a post-doctoral fellow and she was a graduate student. She found him odd and tried gently to disengage, but he kept in touch, pressing her with questions about her sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma.
[snip]
Outside her home in Maryland in 1982, a vandal spray-painted her sorority’s Greek initials, “KKG,” on her fence, sidewalk and fiancé’s car window. A year later a letter she had not written appeared under her name in The Frederick News-Post, defending Kappa Kappa Gamma and the hazing of recruits. She was certain Dr. Ivins was responsible.
She said she had found Dr. Ivins’s attentions creepy. She never told him her Maryland address, but he found it anyway. Later, in e-mail messages, he mentioned details about her sons that she had not shared with him.
“He damaged my property, he impersonated me and he stalked me,” said Dr. Haigwood, now director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center.
Apparently, in spite of his alleged stalking, she still accepted and read email from Ivins–including an email he sent in November 2001 showing himself working with the Ames anthrax.
Dr. Ivins titled his e-mail message “In the lab” and attached photographs: the gaunt microbiologist bending over Petri dishes of anthrax, and colonies of the deadly bacteria, white commas against blood-red nutrient.
[snip]
“Hi, all,” he began the e-mail message. “We were taking some photos today of blood agar cultures of the now infamous ‘Ames’ strain of Bacillus anthracis. Here are a few.” He sent the message to those who ordinarily received his corny jokes and dour news commentaries: his wife and two teenage children, former colleagues and high school classmates. He even included an F.B.I. agent working on the case.
[snip]
“I read that e-mail, and I thought, He did it,” the fellow scientist, Nancy Haigwood, said in a recent interview.
[snip]
In November 2001, when she got the e-mailed photograph of Dr. Ivins working with anthrax in the laboratory, she noticed that he was not wearing gloves — a safety breach she thought showed an unnerving “hubris.” That fed her hunch that he had sent the deadly letters.
Later, when Ivins had become a suspect, the FBI recruited Haigwood to try to bring Ivins out.
Early in 2006, with the investigation largely stalled, Nancy Haigwood heard from two different F.B.I. agents. Four years after she had reported her suspicions of Dr. Ivins, the bureau suddenly seemed interested.“They said, ‘We need your help,’ ” Dr. Haigwood recalled. She was frustrated by the delay, but when the agents asked her to strike up a new correspondence with Dr. Ivins, she reluctantly complied. “I was afraid of this man,” she said. “I was convinced he had done it, and I was afraid he’d send me an anthrax letter.”
[snip]
As the bureau’s undercover informant, Dr. Haigwood struck up a breezy e-mail correspondence about scientific grants, pets and travel. Dr. Ivins complained about psychological screening and other “rather obnoxious and invasive measures” imposed at Fort Detrick since the anthrax attacks.
“I got so tired of the endless questions that I finally got a lawyer, after almost three dozen interviews,” he wrote in late 2006, referring to interviews by the F.B.I. agents. One session, he said, was “virtually an interrogation.”
Is it any wonder, with Haigwood as their undercover informant, that their sole explanation for their biggest non-scientific hole in the case is that this is all about Haigwood and her sorority?
For the moment, then, I remain of the same opinion as Senator Leahy: there’s no reason to believe Ivins acted alone, and plenty of reason to believe he did have help.
Quickly.
There are no sororities and no fraternities at Princeton University.
There are fraternities and sororities at Rider University (about 10 miles south of Princeton) and the tendentiously named “The College of New Jersey” (f/k/a Trenton State College) east of Trenton. Neither of those is near Nassau Street, though.
A bit of a correction – it’s been a while since I’ve been there and when I last passed through, what I stated was correct.
It would seem that some of the sororities (4, it looks like) have decided to try to colonize at Princeton despite the school’s administration’s opposition. Forever, more or less, there had been no sororities or fraternities at PU, with the role frat houses fill on other campuses being more or less filled by “Eating Clubs” or “Dining Clubs” unaffiliated with national fraternity organizations.
Times change….
It’s an office for KKG, not the sorority itself, so that’s not directly pertinent. Though the question of why he’d focus on Princeton is.
Yeah – it looked that way to me, but after egging my own face once and having to wipe it off, I wasn’t going to double down on my knowledge (or lack thereof) of the Princeton campus circa 2001.
Assuming arguendo he, in fact, acted at all.
One can make a plausible story out of the data points and have it point at Ivins. But one can do that and have it point in a lot of different directions.
Some former colleague who hasn’t seen him in 15 or 20 years or so and then says “it’s him” in an intuitive flash does not strike me as a solid basis. Not that the FBI had much choice – they seem to have been flailing around looking for a defendant to pin this on.
And that lack of a defendant tells me that maybe, just maybe, it was some spooked-up character(s) and not a nutty, misfit mad scientist with strange ideas. Like the one said: “if he’d have done this, there’s no way he would have been able to keep it secret”.
Agreed.
agreed.
I just don’t understand why Ivins wasn’t investigated from the gitgo, he would have been on my suspect list?
with you on that one, bmaz. i just don’t believe he did have anything to do with it at all.
motive is just not compelling.
and given the timing, i’ve always suspected powers that be had way too much to gain from cranking up the terror volume. and the targets; why would ivins target this collection, especially daschle and leahy.
i’m far more suspicious of cheney’s foul dismissal against leahy (along with his open threat against wellstone), frankly. of course, my evidence is even slimmer than the fbi’s.
This is exceptionally shoddy reporting. It’s as if the NYT is intentionally misleading its readers like when it printed Judith Miller’s warmongering propaganda – endorsed by the WH as fact b/c it was in the NYT which attributed its source to the WH.
I forget, is the theory that Ivins drove or took the train to Princeton? And was the letter mailed from Princeton or Princeton Junction? I mentioned this once before, but no one would take a train to Princeton hoping to avoid detection, because, from Princeton Junction, you have to take the “dinky” into town. It’s tiny and intimate and really an invitation for someone to spot and remember you.
Since George W Bush has kept the United States homeland safe from attack since 9/11, I’m unsure what anthrax attacks the New York Times is talking about. /American public
That one gives me chills because my tinfoil moments point toward people in DoD.
me too
The DOD Bioweapons people are a MUCH more likely culprit than Ivins ever was. My tinfoil hat moments are haunted by the idea that this was a DOD test gone bad. A test planned and it’s beginnings executed before 9-11, and the occurrence of 9-11 blew a news story that would have been lost in the background into major proportions (Stevens) and the test was continued as cover. And, yes, I know that makes little sense, hence the tinfoil hat.
My thoughts are more sinister. It was a deliberate attack to get the Patriot Act passed, aimed at its most vocal critics. Only DoD could have mobilized that fast. I’m trying to find history on the folks left in DoD from Cheney’s first stint there; that’s where we’ll find the real culprits.
DoD, that’s always been my thought…Look for the motive: please Cheney and get to play harder. Look for the means: a given, laboratories, chemical warfare research. Finally, after Patriot Act passes where was the outrage about the attacks?
The following timeline occurs long after the anthrax attacks, but I wonder if these random events are not a campaign to sell Americans on importance of vaccines and vaccine manufacturers?
April 21, 2004
fictional TV show West Wing airs episode 19 of Season 5: “Talking Points” during which the White House biohazard alarm is tripped. After lock down ends, some people are told it was just a drill, the president is told it was real.
July 21, 2004
Bush signs Project Bioshield Act of 2004
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news…..721-2.html
October 2004
There is an inexplicable world-wide flu vaccine shortage. Chiron’s English supplier is told it has tainted vaccine and cannot be used. Flu shots are rationed to Americans.
Question abound. How could this happen? I want my flu shot!
Devon Herrick from the National Center for Policy Analysis states (October 28, 2004) the answer to preventing a recurrence of such a shortage is making vaccine production profitable again. (Bad, Hillary! She had the US government buy childhood vaccines at a discount. No profit margins).
Herrick’s solution: remove government regulation of vaccine manufacturers, prevent government discount purchases of vaccine (bad, Hillary!), and bring tort reform in order to protect the drug companies from liability if their vaccines cause harm.
Hmm, “deregulation.” I wonder if that would work?
I won’t try to guess Herrick’s political affiliation. Hope his 401K is sitting safe and healthy in the deregulated marketplace. http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba493/
Ayep.
Nah, gotta be Cheney’s office.
Bob in HI
temporarily in So CA
Judy who?
You say that you see no reason to believe that Ivins acted alone. I see no reason to believe he acted AT ALL. I can see no reason to suspect Ivins at all, except that for some reason the FBI suspected him. His suicide (if it was a suicide and not an accidental overdose, an easy and frequent occurrence with heavy drinkers who take any form of paracetamol (Tylenol)) is easily explained by the stress and depression caused by the ceaseless hounding of the FBI over the course of years. There is simply NO direct evidence against him, and literally all the circumstantial evidence points not only at him but at the possibly several hundred other people with access to the Ames strain. The FBI’s much self-vaunted scientific evidence points absolutely nowhere, not even at the flask they claim it points to, and even if it did, Ivins had neither the expertise nor the equipment necessary to make the dried, finely milled and possibly weaponised anthrax that was mailed. The FBI is accomplishing it’s goal of implicating Ivins in the mind of the public by simple repetition.
Yeah, that was my reaction upon reading that sentence, too.
Nothing I’ve heard of points to Ivins or even to the Ft. Detrick lab. Somebody’s going to have to convince me that that lab would have been capable of producing the preparation that wound up in those envelopes.
brown fibers?
What color brown I wonder. Army brown?
I’m curious whether the elderly woman (I believe she was Asian) who died in an NY apartment building was exposed by the mail or by some other means that might change the lone mailer theory.
I haven’t reread the reports of her death, but I recall her death was puzzling to authorities investigating the anthrax attacks.
Also a woman in Connecticut, iirc.
Yes, I forgot that. Last explanation I heard on the news, older person weaker immune system.
Wonder if their mail really came through the same postal center.
re: why Princeton
Johnnson & Johnson buildings are the only thing I associate with Princeton, NJ other than its university.
If the anthrax was weaponised, and my understanding of the weaponization process is correct (which very well might not be the case) then there simply would not have been enough time to prepare the post-Stevens attacks if the purpose was the passage of the Patriot Act, which was a rush-job, unless it were already prepared for a different purpose and simply diverted.
Hmmmm, all this chit chat and, yet, no mention of germ boy…..
Give him back to us!
I’d rather give him a cage and a bear.
Generally it’s safe to assume I’m thinking of germ boy every time I mention Judy.
Particularly when I point out Army panic and squelched investigations.
from my oxdown diary a few weeks back suggesting some other directions Rod Lurie could have gone with his movie based on the CIA leak case:
AS THE ASPENS TURN: A melodrama set in the stark Wyoming wilds where Rodeo Clown Cooter secretly romances Trudy the town spinster through their shared love of keeping the town safe and germ-free, all the while Cooter helps his boss, Dead-Eye Dick, the town’s evil overlord, out a covert CIA Operative in a time of war for petty political payback.
Has the media figured out wether this was weaponized anthrax or not? Weren’t we initially told that this stuff was more sophisticated than anything the Russians had come up with? And then it wasn’t? Which one was it? I’m still not clear on this.
Geez, I finally got around to reading the article and it’s not up to Shane’s usual standard. At least he does throw this in at the beginning:
Followed closely with:
Sorry, Garrett, from where we stand we don’t even have a clue how high the mountain is…
Well, at least we now have an admission from a former FBI person that this case never would have gone anywhere without more damning evidence.
I wonder if Seymore Hersh is going to hear anything about this on the 20th.
I’ve seen nothing to indicate that Nancy Haigwood is anything but a straight-shooter, but she’s making a LOT of intuitive jumps here:
He’s a science geek who’s clumsy with women. Every biology department in the country has post-docs like this. Hell, they’re probably prized hires, because the lack of a wife and kids means you can squeeze more hours out of them.
The two incidents are separated by a year, and there’s no evidence that Ivins was involved in either one.
Was she in the phone book? If so, this doesn’t sound all that “stalky” to me.
This could be creepy, but it could just be stuff that he heard from mutual friends, and she doesn’t really tell us enough to know which one it is. If he knew where her kids were going to college, or that one of them just won the state baseball championship, or anything else that you’d find out from catching up with old friends, I’m not willing to call this creepy.
Can we see the photo(s), please? Was he “bending over Petri dishes”, or was he “working with anthrax”? If he was touching the plates, then I agree that he should have been wearing gloves. If, on the other hand, he was posing for a photo op and just standing next to the plates, then it really doesn’t tell you anything. And even if he WAS handling the plates, it just says that he was being sloppy.
This is pretty much exactly how I’d expect him to behave if he was completely innocent. If you’re flown since 9/11, then you’ve probably also complained about the “rather obnoxious and invasive measures” that we all now have to go through.
And was she able to wrangle ANYTHING out of those e-mails that even remotely suggested that Ivins was guilty? I doubt it, because we’d have seen the e-mails already. And if he was really a top suspect, you can bet your ass that the FBI had its behavioral psych people working on those e-mails to try to rattle something loose.
I’m sorry, but all I see here is that Dr Haigwood thought Ivins was a creep. And even if he WAS a creep, I don’t see anything here to suggest that he was the anthrax mailer.
Here’s the photo.
Good god he’s guilty – GUILTY!!
Or not
It certainly looks like he’s being dumb. I’ll tell you that whenever we have a photographer in the lab, we tend to do silly things for them so that they can get their shot, so the only other thing I’d wonder is whether or not he’s really looking at anthrax, as opposed to sterile media plates. Even so, it’s pretty stupid to handle things in an anthrax lab without wearing gloves. Still, I’m not sure how you get from “pretty stupid” to “evil genius who single-handedly masterminded the anthrax attacks”.
I’m with you there.
Another question: Weren’t we also told that he confessed to his shrink in front of multiple witnesses? What happened to that story?
In fairness to the Times, they may have just decided that their source for this aspect of the story didn’t have enough credibility to merit publication in the NYT.
OT- Reid will meet with Burris.
I was looking at the timeline from the linkbox; it has a date of the first postmarks about 4+ weeks prior to Judy’s faked B.anthracis letter. There were imitation mailings in numerous cities by a sundry selection of disgruntled employees around that time, several such shams were reported in papers I happened to read in a part of the country far from the Beltway. I first noticed Judy much later, since I was only a rare reader of Nyt; she was a standout mixture of expertise and prewar hype as 2002 progressed. I wonder what her reaction was, or who else in her office it might have been intended to scare, as well as who would have wanted to send even a fake to her, based on her standing at that time in autumn 2001. Having taken a course in the legal side of postal service in the US, it was interesting to read how quickly and effectively usps responded to protect congress. But I wonder if that efficiency and the subsequent presidential commission engaging usps in forward planning to make the mails more intelligent, might have squelched some originally planned followgthrough, if even some of the mailings were coordinated. They seem like classic spy novel stuff, but also credibly single perpetrator crank in orgin. I had a fascinating history teacher in high school, now retired, according to most recent news; he had served long ago in the pentagon as a person assigned to read crank letters. He had a great sense of humor, and was a very reality connected kind of person, who wove an eccentric and insightful rendition of what US history actually was about, and what watershed events had occurred quietly, like the discount store aspirin poisonings that caused repackaging of many supermarket goods with an extra seal. I think barcodes on snailmail will be recording pen register sorts of data in the future, as a preventive measure to shorten the investigation time in the new environment.
I’ve always thought of germ boy as an agent of a foreign country. One that is probably very good at making weaponized anthrax.
anybody thinking of neuro-toxins in Mike Connell?
Thanks ew.
digg
that haigwood is the director of the oregon national primate research center caught my eye. the onprc lists her as becoming director in 2007. i remembered that this facility got lots of bad press locally. an amimal rights activist took a job there and after 2 years of undercover work, blew the whistle on them back in 2001. here is a link to the article http://wweek.com/html/science010301.html. there were many other actions by animal rights groups i remember hearing about in the past decade. i don’t know exactly how this fits with the current topic, except that running this facility would need to include keeping a lid on the awful experiences of their research subjects.
try this link
http://wweek.com/html/science010301.html
No mention of Dr. Zack in this thread?
THE 9/11 ANTHRAX FRAME-UP
http://whatreallyhappened.com/…..ameup.html
http://whatreallyhappened.com/…..spect.html
CAUGHT ON TAPE
An investigation was launched that exposed the shockingly lax security measures at the lab, and raised the possibility that some specimens may never have been entered in lab records. Also uncovered was a tape from a surveillance camera showing the entry of an unauthorized person into the lab, at 8:40, on January 23, 1992, let in by Dr. Marian Rippy, lab pathologist. The night visitor was Lt. Col. Philip Zack, a former employee who had left as a result of a dispute with the lab over his alleged harassment of Dr. Assaad. The Courant reports:
THE KAMEL KLUB KIDS
According to Assaad, in the week before Easter 1991, he found a poem in his mailbox, described in another Courant story:
Charming, eh? This kind of organized harassment has an ideological edge to it not completely attributable to personal antipathy, and seems politically inspired, a possibility that is intriguing given the political repercussions of the anthrax scare.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j022202.html
Well, I still am having a really hard time accepting that Ivins led a relatively normal life, teaching sunday school, parenting his own children and making a good living and that he ended up with such severe mental illness suddenly (meaning without a lifetime of mental illness) so late in life. It’s just very uncommon. It doesn’t fit a pattern that would seem “normal” to me. His description of paranoia seems pretty severe. In order to work in the field he does he would have to be organized, disciplined. These are not traits that go with the kind of psychosis he was experiencing. Almost all the literature I read on psychotic mood disorders and late onset schizophrenia make a couple things clear.
1) it’s rare. The kind of psychosis he would have experienced would be extremely rare. Twice as likely for women than men, and more likely for those in low economic conditions. (neither of these traits fits Ivins).
2) There is almost always some tell tale signs of previous mental illness or undiagnosed co morbid mental illness. For late onset schizophrenia (which is highly controversial as to it’s existence and whether or notit exists) most late onset cases found undiagnosed schizoid personality traits prior to onset. (this would have likely been debilitating for him if he had this…not the guy teaching sunday school or romping with his kids playfully). Things like marriage, sunday school teacher, long term employment are not found in people with such severe mental illness that they are experiencing psychosis.
3) It is almost always accompanied by severe disorganization, debilitating and incoherent speaking and writing patterns, and the inability to care for oneself. Why would they allow him to keep his security clearance, why would they allow him to continue working?
4) According to the articles I could find he was on celexa. Celexa does not treat delusions or psychosis. It’s used for depression, and ocd, and some other stuff, but paranoia of the disruptive level he describes in his e-mails does not seem to fit for celexa. Why were they not medicating his severe paranoia? Why wasn’t he being treated with resperidol, or lithium or an antipsychotic OR an anti seizure med if he had manic psychosis?
4) There is a quote from one of his e-mails that describes that he “knows” he is experiencing paranoia. He states that this is what really scares him. On June 27, 2000, Ivins wrote in an e-mail to a friend: “Even with the Celexa and the counseling, the depression episodes still come and go. That’s unpleasant enough. What is REALLY scary is the paranoia.” Now, I know that some folks KNOW when they are paranoid, but my experience is that those who know are much less likely to be “acting out” on those thoughts. It makes sense really. But most of my paranoid clients don’t believe they are really paranoid. They truly believe that others are out to get them, and can be dangerous because they feel they are defending themselves by acting out.
5) His behavior does fit alcoholism. There could be mood swings, grandiosity, and paranoia. There could be psychosis. However, we would see that while he was abstinent from alcohol for 30 days or more, he would have gotten some relief from this symptoms unless he had a comorbid disorder (that would have likely been present from early adulthood on).
I am not saying that it’s impossible, but the severity of his break down, so late in life, with such extreme paranoia and the fact that so many people who were close to him did NOT see this behavior throughout his life seems rare. All the reports I could find on his problems suggested that the break downs began in 2000. AT the very least he was well enough to be able to “fool” at least some people in to thinking he was “fine” (that takes some level of mental health) The articles often explained this as a “long” history of mental illness. I don’t know who is telling them this. A couple years doesn’t seem “long” to me, if put in the perspective of a lifetime of fairly normal mental health. (and given that he is probably more successful, economically stable, and socially connected that most people suffering mental illness of the caliber described).
This has made me wonder if it’s possible that they were giving him lsd without his knowledge and that he thought he was going insane. I know tin foil hat here…but it’s not like there aren’t some facts to suggest that this is “plausible”. Maybe no facts to support that it happened or didn’t happen, but to me, this fits his pattern of behavior better than the mental health descriptions.
These are some of the articles I read…it is difficult to find much on psychotic mood disorders that does not end up lapsing into discussion about schizophrenia, of which, he does not meet an “average” profile.
http://www.acnp.org/g4/GN401000138/CH135.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/…..-usju.html
http://www.medicinenet.com/citalopram/article.htm
http://emedicine.medscape.com/…..6-overview
Judy “I was fucking right” Miller sure comes up when it comes to false reporting about WMD’s in Iraq and other destructive and false reporting. What the hell was up with those editors at the NYT? Allowing such shoddy and very dangerous reporting?
Where is ole Laura Myrolie one of Judy’s partners in crime?
A few of Juan Cole’s thoughts about Judith Miller and Laura Myrolie’s book ” Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf”
” Journalists are often part of the political establishment themselves. Judith Miller is a Neocon who co-authored with the highly unreliable Laura Mylroie, and so was predisposed to buy the nonsense she was fed by Chalabi and his contexts. (The NYT seems to have a fair number of Neocons on its staff, for a supposedly liberal newspaper).
5) Journalism does not practice, or sometimes sufficiently respect, peer review. As editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies for Cambridge University Press, when I receive an article on Iraq I send it out to five or so of the major experts on Iraq in universities. If they all come back and say it is weak in evidence and argument, I don’t publish it. This way of proceeding ensures that articles in my journal are solid. There is no time to referee newspaper articles, though some national magazines, like The Nation, do excellent fact checking. We can contrast academic peer review to the practice at think tanks. The American Enterprise Institute just publishes the book, without peer review. It publishes books that push or support policies to which the think tank is dedicated. This is why silly books like those of Mylroie or Khidir Hamza can see print, and sometimes even sell well. Some journalists do not know the difference between a solid book by Peter Sluglett on Iraq, published by a major academic press, and some screed put out of a Washington think tank by someone who does not know Arabic and has never been in an archive. (I hasten to add that there are lots of real intellectuals in the ranks of journalists, and there are even many former academics, who know these distinctions all too well, but I believe they are a minority). Lee Bollinger at Columbia University is thinking seriously about how this sort of problem could be solved by tinkering with the degree program in journalism there.”
Another monster national security crime where an accused ends up dead before a trial.
Amazing how often that happens.