Q: What do you believe was the motivation for the anthrax attacks?
A: The practice of inventing or exaggerating an attack or a threat in order to stimulate demand for military build-up and war has been in place forever. (The Gulf of Tonkin incident and the fabrication of Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti babies out of incubators before the first Gulf War are important, relatively recent examples.) In his 1961 Farewell Address, President Eisenhower warned about the "unwarranted influence" and “misplaced power” of the “military-industrial complex.” Before that, General Douglas MacArthur declaimed: “Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.” And before that, General Smedley Butler: “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.” And while we are at it, let’s also heed James Madison, the primary author of our Constitution: “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.” And: “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
Q: Are you saying the motivation traces back to the profit motive of the military-industrial complex?
A: For many involved in this practice of inventing/exaggerating threat, this is part of an effort to maximize profits. Others are believers in the need for a military build-up, and justify the invention/exaggeration as necessary to establish priority among competing demands for appropriations. No matter the quality of the motivation, the practice is fraudulent, and is directly responsible for the ignored phenomenon that the U.S. spends more on its military than all of the other countries in the world combined.
Q: And is the world’s No. 1 arms merchant as well, plus the U.S. has ringed the globe with 700-800 military installations, all for “defense” of course but, taken together, giving the appearance very much of an aggressive posture, the stance of an imperialist superpower.
A: The neocons who controlled policy under Bush were of course very closely connected to the “defense” sector of our economy, and the profits made in that sector have of course skyrocketed during the past eight years. What distinguished the neocons in this context was that they did not only rely upon inventing/exaggerating threat, they also explicitly espoused “full-spectrum dominance” for the sake of the ascendance of American empire.
Q: So where do the anthrax letters fit in?
A: The anthrax letters must be viewed in this historical context. In the case of the anthrax letters, the invention/exaggeration of threat took the perverse form of an inside job. The Bush Administration has had to officially acknowledge that the anthrax letters were an inside job. But in order to minimize the implications of this fact, the official account resorts to the flimsy claim that the insider was a lone nut named Bruce Ivins, peculiarly driven to stimulate demand for his anthrax vaccine.
The obvious cover-up in Amerithrax, which depends on the complicity of not only our FBI and Department of Justice, but also of our mainstream media, demonstrates how economically and politically powerful are our military-industrial-intelligence forces. Remarkably, despite the admission of inside job, the anthrax letters continue to serve their dual purpose of generating profits and of achieving dominance in the ghastly realm of bioweapons.
Q: Thank you, Barry Kissin.
(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant who formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and wire services. He is the author of the article, “ America The Beautiful’s Germ Warfare Rash” published in The Humanist magazine. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com. Reach Kissin at barrykissin@hotmail.com)
Barry Kissin leads a march in downtown Frederick to protest plans for the new “biodefense” campus at Fort Detrick . A variety of peace groups came together to express concerns that this campus will threaten local health and safety as well as international arms control.
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