Anthrax, ANTHRAX!

It seems at long last the anthrax case in the USA may be coming to an end and the FBI have their man.

Too bad he's dead.

The FBI's lead suspect in the September, 2001 anthrax attacks -- Bruce E. Ivins -- died Tuesday night, apparently by suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the attacks. For the last 18 years, Ivins was a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where he was one of the most elite government anthrax scientists on the research team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID).

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters -- with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 -- that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.

Ivins added bentonite to the samples of the spores that were used, a chemica that was only used by Iraqi biowarfare specialists. That was how the lie was planted. Unfortunately, the bentonite did not detract from the fact that further analysis showed the spores were grown in Ft Detrick labs.

The letters sent out read:

We have anthrax.

You die now.

Are you afraid?

Death to America.

Death to Israel.

Allah is great.

Implicating Islamic terrorism in addition to Iraq. There is no doubt in my mind that this was part of the campaign to shore up support for a war in Iraq. The anthrax came from Ft Detrick. Ivins worked at Ft Detrick. Reports leaked to ABC implicating by name Iraq as the source of the anthrax came from Ft Detrick. Link Iraq to Islamic terrorism. Link the anthrax attacks to 9-11. 9-11 = Iraq. Osama bin Laden and Saddam are working together.

The narrative is obvious and bears no real repeating.

The most interesting thing though is that the piggybacking technique of this act of terrorism is an idea that originated on the far-right of the US political spectrum, among the militias dreaming of destroying the Federal Government. There are papers that have been circulated among such groups calling for anonymous follow-up attacks in the case of foreign terrorism against the USA - a grassroots strategy of tension designed to throw society to the far-right while dealing some deadly blows to their establishment enemies (notably centrist and left wing politicians).

I tried doing some looking around on sites that track the far right to see what they had on Ivins, if anything. As it turns out, extremely little. His political affiliations do not seem to be listed, only that he has a very violent temper and apparently came up with a plan to methodically murder all of his co-workers just a month before he offed himself.

However, it is worth noting that, attacks on the media aside (which I suspect were done for publicity), the real attacks on political figures were done on those on the left, Daschle, Leahy and Feingold's office. It is also worth noting that the person who sent fake anthrax letters a few years later - piggybacking off the piggyback terrorism - was none other than Chad Conrad Castagana, a Freeper, Michelle Malkin fan and extreme Christian Nationalist who once said:

Liberals and Lefties everywhere in America's institutions are trying to slowly but increasingly ban Christianity from America, from our site, from our discourse !
They have already succeded in banning any sign of Christianity from ourPublic Schools ! !

If THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST were released today for the first time, it would be slapped with an NC-17 rating !

So there is no conclusive evidence of this being militia orientated....however the links in methodology are disturbing, especially when we consider how this came from within high ranks of the US military (Maj. Gen. John Parker perpetuated the lie that the USA did not have powder anthrax, only liquid) and also apparently served the interests of the government of the time - well before most manouvering on the Iraq war had even begun to take place. Of course, some figures within the US administration, notably the Pentagon neocons, were pushing for an attack on Iraq immediately after 9-11 (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith etc) but that was not public knowledge at the time.

This raises a lot more questions than it solves, it seems.

Hearts and Minds

Welcome to the modern day war zone. Right now, as I speak, a thousand battles are being waged for your submission and allegiance. Commanders and politicians have decided that the enemy is us and that we are to be bought to heel, as soon as possible.

No doubt some of you think I'm using hyperbole, or metaphor to illustrate an example of our socially fractured society and the commodification of identity. And while those certainly are problems, anyone thinking about those in relation to my rant today are wrong. Right now, you and I are quite literally at war with at least one government, namely that of the USA.

Oh to be sure there won't be running battles with light infantry. No air-strikes are going to be called in on your house, and I'm reasonably certain you wont get carted away to Guantanomo Bay, or any other black site that exists. But just because guns aren't being loaded and blood isn't been spilt doesn't mean this isn't a conflict.

You see, war isn't about the clash of armies on the battlefield anymore. Hell, its barely even about killing, except as an advertising hook or a final solution for people who refuse to stop being a pain in the ass. No, warfare has moved through the gentlemanly period of pitched battles and low casualties, blown apart by Napoleon and perfected in the slaughterhouse of WWI. Its not even the dirty political warfare that characterized the Cold War, marked by futile superpower conflict and strategies designed to bleed a superpower by third world proxies, and on the other end of the scale by terrorism.

No, warfare today is about fighting on the psychological and narrative level. Its about capturing the mind, and shackling it to the agenda of the day, regardless of what that agenda may be.

The thing is, you see, as warfare has become less and less about artful strategy and less bound by codes of conduct – be they religious, cultural or legal – the real issue has not been arms, logistics, intelligence and skill, but about the sheer will to fight. Whoever goes on fighting the longest, whoever is willing to do what it takes to persuade the other side to accept their interests, whoever is able to effectively frame the agenda in a certain manner, is the winner in the modern world. You can even suffer strategic setbacks if your message and will is powerful enough.

And of course, if you accept this as essentially true, broadly speaking, then logically you come to the problem being people who wont get the fuck on with the message. The enemy ceases to be those who threaten certain strategic alliances, deposits of raw materials and the lives of the citizenry. No, the enemy becomes anyone who undermines that message and so weakens that will to resolve the conflict – and that person can be anyone, even your own citizenry.

Back in the day, they used to call this PsyOps. It used to only be a wartime enterprise. Dropping leaflets over enemy cities and troop formations. Doing pirate broadcasts using exiles and friendlies from the nation you are at war with to convince them of widespread resentment towards the government. Smear and ridicule important political and military leaders in any way possible.

Like I said, it used to be only a wartime enterprise. But now, thanks to the Cold War terrorism, carried to its conclusion by the likes of Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, the difference between peace and war only exists in a legal sense. The potentially endless war on terror means actually endless psychological operations – carried out against not just the enemy, but the civilian population at home as well. The media has to hang the enemy with words and discourses and justifications before the military can do it in fact.

Nowadays, PsyOps is only one part of a much broader school, known as Information Operations. Do you operate a blog, report on the failing and lies and crimes of your country? Then you are are, according to this world-view, engaging in warfare against the state. But its not just about information per se. You have to think about this much more broadly. For example, protests. A protest is not just a protest. It never can be. Its an expression of low intensity conflict relying on moral discourses and popular expression of dissidence, aimed at bringing about a political-military confrontation.

And just where do you think something like Operation MindFuck fits into this system of ideas? Since many of us tend to think of O:MF as a way of mentally shaking people up, getting them to question their assumptions, physically deconstructing the popular discourses of the day, stripping away the bare truth hidden beneath self-serving platitudes...well, in that case, it is nothing more than a direct challenge to state power.

That may dishearten some of you. But the simple truth is, thinking for yourself, and then communicating those thoughts to others, will always be seen that way, so long as this world-view dominates. You may as well get used to it, because unless you decide to never share your views, or have a frontal lobotomy, you will almost certainly do something that could be considered an act of war. And if you get really good at it, you may even end up in a real domestic war – as the crazy elements of the thuggish far right, security services and corporate sponsored smear teams conspire to make your life hell through intimidation, surveillance and character assassination.

And to be honest, once you realize that you are in the war, a certain clarity accompanies that knowledge. You can now diagnose this uneasy feeling all of the above has been creating. You know what it is now, the nature of the Beast is discerned and laid bare. Once you know what the problem is, you can set about dealing with it. Few things are insurmountable, once you understand their purpose and context.

Unfortunately, you have little choice about this. The line has already been drawn in the sand, and you're on the wrong side. What happens next is a matter of policy, insanity, personal whim and plain old bad luck. Because you're not quite the perpetual pain in the ass that, say, Al-Qaeda is, you won't be facing the guns. You can be drowned out by voices of far-right harpies, military “experts” who 'just happen' to be taking pay cheques from the Pentagon and spineless journalists more content with attacking those who search for the truth than politicians who hide it.

There is a spectrum of responses, if you will. If you do this, the response will be that. And if you do something else, the response will differ in proportion. But like all Platonic constructs of reality, there are gaps in the conceptual definitions put forward. And it is in such gaps that the game must be played most effectively. Operation MindFuck works best in areas where they are no response. So go beyond blogging, or political protest, or pranks, or sabotage and mild acts of ontological guerilla warfare. Mix and match, be innovative, experiment and push the boundaries. And remember, even though this is a war, unconventional forces always have the advantage over hierarchies.

Cain's "Pentagon" Law of Stupid Policies

Any effectively large enough institution, given an infinite black budget and enough time, will try out every idea in the world, no matter how stupid, implausible, reckless, historically proven to be bad or flying in the face of all known scienctific principles that idea is.

Its like the monkeys with typewriters, only you have to fund and release all the pages of gibberish they write, too. Which is why a good deal of the time you have to put up with people like this coming up with your strategic doctrine.