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Posted August 3rd, 2008 at 8:30 am

The WaPo reports in a front-page piece today that the FBI investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people, may be officially closed tomorrow, sending a “strong signal that the FBI and Justice Department think they got their man — and that he is dead, foreclosing the possibility of a prosecution.” In other words, the FBI must be exceedingly confident that they had their guy, he was government scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins, and Ivins’ suicide wraps up the probe of one of the scariest terrorist incidents ever to occur on U.S. soil.

But before we move on, I hope readers will take a moment to read Glenn Greenwald’s fascinating synthesis of one of the most important, and certainly the most politically salient, angles to this entire story — the bogus notion that the weaponized anthrax included traces of bentonite, which purportedly would have linked the attack to Saddam Hussein’s non-existent biological weapons program.

ABC News, Glenn explained in detail, relied on multiple administration sources to concoct a story that was patently false. Glenn argues it’s “the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade.”

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax — tests conducted at Ft. Detrick — revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since — as ABC variously claimed — bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.”

ABC News’ claim — which they said came at first from “three well-placed but separate sources,” followed by “four well-placed and separate sources” — was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It’s critical to note that it isn’t the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

That means that ABC News’ “four well-placed and separate sources” fed them information that was completely false — false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein.

Wait, it gets worse.

If the investigation is officially wrapping up, as it appears to be, and the FBI is confident that the perpetrator is now dead, there’s no reason for ABC News to protect sources that deliberately lied as part of a larger initiative to con the public into supporting an unnecessary war in Iraq.

For that matter, those who helped spread the lie should obviously be held accountable. In this instance, that has to include John McCain, who appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman” on Oct. 18, 2001, before ABC ran with its patently false stories linking the anthrax attacks to Iraq.

LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

MCCAIN: I think we’re doing fine…. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase — if I could just make one, very quickly — the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.

LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?

MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that’s when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.

We now know that McCain’s comments and judgment was horrifically wrong. As Dayo Olopade noted, “[T]aken to its logical conclusion, McCain’s statement should be politically devastating. It ties McCain back to the march for war (even before the bentonite claim began to float), establishes his lack of intellectual rigor in asking the right questions before making the “tough decisions,” and, as would only seem fair these days, confirms his own status as a vain and irresponsible celebrity.”

Why did ABC News trumpet a false story? Who were the network’s sources? What led McCain to spread this lie on national television, feeding, in the most irresponsible way possible, into the fear and hysteria that was already prevalent nationwide?

We’ll see if the media presses for any of these answers. In the meantime, read Glenn’s whole piece.