There are other, more basic reasons to suspect that the American far right might be responsible for the real anthrax attacks. While Middle Eastern terrorists remain the first suspects -- largely because they are blamed for the Sept. 11 atrocities -- there are indications that the anthrax strain used in Florida, New York and Washington was domestic in origin. All of the samples from those attacks are derived from the Ames strain, a variety of anthrax devised in the United States.
Nonetheless, there is no evidence yet concretely linking any domestic terrorists with the genuine anthrax threats, while the clues indicating Middle Eastern involvement remain fairly compelling.
However, what can be surmised with greater certainty is that many of the hoax anthrax threats were the work of radical-right terrorists, considering their targets, which tended to be either abortion clinics or government agencies. In one case in the Seattle area, the threat was accompanied by explicit white-supremacist literature and was sent to a woman married to a man of another race.
What is striking about all these threats is the reality that anthrax in general is not a serious weapon of mass destruction. The Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan -- which later killed 12 people in a Tokyo subway bioterrorism attack using Sarin -- discovered this in 1993, when it attempted on three occasions to spread anthrax spores around government offices, to no avail.
This is particularly true of at least some of the anthrax sent through the mail, specifically to the media, which government officials have classified as a lower-grade, crude form of the spore. "That's why I think the main goal of these recent anthrax incidents was not actually to kill people, because the way they did it was actually a very poor way to kill people," says Mark Pitcavage, National Director of Fact-Finding for the Anti-Defamation League. "It's primarily to cause fear and panic. And that's one of the reasons it was sent to news agencies."
"I think the whole world knows, as a result of what happened in 1998 and 1999, that Americans get scared easily about anthrax. And I think this was a terrorist attack in the sense of trying explicitly to cause terror. Casualties would be gravy, but really terror was what was intended."
Likewise, the hundreds of hoax threats that have piled onto the genuine anthrax cases seem intended also to spread terror. And yet when Attorney General John Ashcroft denounced the hoaxes, he referred only to a single case in which a Connecticut man created a hoax threat as an apparent workplace joke. FBI Director Robert Mueller likewise lumped the hoaxes in with pranks. There was no recognition that the hoaxes could well be part of an effort to abet the terrorists who mailed the real anthrax.
Unfortunately, that view meshes with a common governmental approach to the activities of the far right in general.
When President Bush addressed the Congress -- and the nation -- on the evening of Sept. 20, nine days after the first attacks, he declared that "the only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows."
Bush's remarks suggest an obliviousness to the fact that one of the important places that terrorism has been growing for the past decade is in Americans' own backyards. Bush's definition of terrorism seemed only to view its practitioners as overseas products; his statements then and since have seemed to refer only to Middle Eastern terrorists.
Other Republicans in key positions have made plain that the domestic terrorism engaged in by the American right would not be viewed as part of Bush's "war on terrorism." Florida Republican Porter J. Goss, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, explicitly said so during hearings on the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The trouble is, 'terrorism' is a very broad word, and it lends itself to a lot of mischief for people who would abuse common sense," Goss said. He then cited bombings of abortion clinics. "To me, that's not the kind of terrorism I'm talking about."
"That's criminal law enforcement," Goss said. "But it would fit most broad definitions of terrorism because the purpose [of those attacks] is to scare people." (Of course, as Pitcavage observes, the primary purpose of the recent anthrax attacks has also been to scare people, but that point appears to have eluded Goss.)
Eric Rudolph, among others, would be pleased to hear Goss's extraordinarily narrow view of what constitutes terrorism.
Next page: Unavoidable similarities