Comfort in whispered allegations...

2 Nov, 2001 09:20 AM6 mins to read

With the anthrax death toll mounting, America's hunt for those responsible becomes ever more desperate, as ROGER FRANKLIN reports.

Last weekend, Watergate sleuth Bob Woodward broke a story that quoted anonymous sources as blaming rightwing extremists for the anthrax-tainted letters that have so far killed four people and bathed the US in a cold sweat.

If foreign jihadists were not enough of a worry, it seemed that America had also to contend with a virulent fifth column of homegrown fanatics.

Bad news? Well, yes - but, then again, not really. Oddly enough, given the hardening paranoia that now underscores every aspect of American life, those hints and whispered allegations against the loony, rabid right provided a measure of curiously comforting reassurance.

As Woodward's story - also leaked to at least a dozen less revered reporters - led all the nightly newscasts, you could almost hear a sigh of collective relief: "Whew. The anthrax panic might not be bin Laden's work after all. Thank God for that."

In a nation so jumpy that baby powder, bird droppings and parmesan cheese are being mistaken for anthrax spores, the notion that the perpetrators might be nothing worse than a mob of rednecks with a chemistry set and a home-brew kit came as a boon.

For all the damage and pain he inflicted, America forced itself to come to terms with Timothy McVeigh's brand of red, white and blue fanaticism. His was one face of a devil it knows. If the Oklahoma Bomber's brothers in arms proved as easy to catch, arrests might be but days away.

To judge by the additional leaks being fed to tame reporters last week, the extreme right's complicity seemed beyond doubt. There were references in all the serious newspapers to Gene Schroeder, the head of Posse Comitatus, who was known to have had meetings with Iraqi diplomats in 1990. A couple of years later, as the Village Voice reminded its readers, Oklahoma Klansman Dennis Mahon led half-a-dozen fellow sheetheads in a series of protests against the Gulf War.

As for hands-on experience with biotoxins, America's white supremacists were said to have that, too. In 1993, for example, a leader of the Aryan Nations was caught with a fruit jar of ricin, a poison he had distilled from castor beans. Another group was nailed with a vat of industrial cyanide. And just in case anybody missed the drift, the leakers reminded their countrymen of a third incident: the 1995 arrest of an apostate Aryan called Larry Wayne Harris, who was apprehended with three vials of inert bubonic plague virus in the glovebox of his car.

Then there were the stocking stuffers that added bulk to the circumstantial case, things like this obscene doggerel, which was penned to the tune of America the Beautiful and posted last week on the Aryan Nations website: O' wicked land of sodomites Your World Trade Center's gone With crashing planes and burning flames To hell your souls have gone.

Finally, a gotcha worthy of Colombo: The dates on several of the anthrax letters had been written in the distinctive American style, the month proceeding the day, as in 9-11-2001. All in all, it was a flimsy case. But for most of last week, as fear bred desperation, Woodward's thesis represented the prevailing wisdom.

"Everything seems to lean toward a domestic source," one senior FBI official told Woodward. "Nothing seems to fit with an overseas terrorist-type operation."

By week's end, however, like the hope of a quick victory in Afghanistan, accusations against the militias and survivalists were beginning to seem dubious at best.

For starters, at least two of the letters were mailed from towns in New Jersey adjacent to America's largest enclave of fundamentalist Muslims. Second, at least two of the hijackers are known to have been suffering from skin rashes and heavy colds - symptoms consistent with anthrax exposure. Finally, the first anthrax fatality was at the Florida headquarters of the Globe tabloid, which just happens to be less than 8km from where several of the hijackers stayed while learning to fly.

So why did at least some Bush administration officials go out of their way to direct America's anger inward rather than toward Iraq, which a hardline faction inside the Defence Department fervently believes to be the source of the anthrax?

At this point, rather than Woodward's scoop, it might pay to recall the advice of Washington newsman, I. F. Stone, a maverick who dogged American presidents for more than 50 years until his death in the early 80s. The first thing journalists should ask themselves, Stone advised, is not what a leaker leaks, but why he is leaking it.

The answer in this instance may well be that going after the most obvious group of suspects - Muslim communities in the US - is just too difficult, too politically sensitive, for the FBI's tastes. That's not just speculation, but an opinion expressed by another "senior bureau official" whose comments were also reported in Woodward's Washington Post.

"The veil of religion that has been draped over mosques ... will be tough to move off," the source told reporter Walter Pincus, before getting to the nub of the agency's problem. The Arab American community, the source worried, "might become enraged and beat on the FBI."

Half a world away in Afghanistan, US conduct of the war is the subject of growing complaint. Either go in boots and all, critics say, or call off the bombers before the civilian death toll turns the tide of international opinion against the US. By late last week, that advice had been taken to heart in the Pentagon, where officials confirmed that B-52s were carpet-bombing Taleban positions.

But on the homefront, where the enemy is harder to find, the FBI leaks fables and chases phantoms. With every day bringing fresh reports of anthrax exposures, this much is certain: it's a lousy way to run a war.

There is one other possibility, a Machiavellian one that will bring no comfort to Woodward. It is this. What if the FBI is making progress? What if the leaks about rightwing militias were nothing but a smokescreen to distract attention from the real investigation? What if Woodward, who brought down one Republican president, has been played for a dupe by another?

Who would do such a thing? Consider what Henry Kissinger once said about now Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "He's the most ruthless son of a bitch I've ever met." If a man like Kissinger thinks someone is ruthless, rest assured, that person is capable of just about anything.

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