1) The Lie of the Land

On 26th October 2001 ABC news led its main bulletin with an exclusive report claiming a direct link between the then recent Anthrax mailings and the bioweapons program of Saddam Hussain's Iraq. Based on "well-placed" sources, the story made several claims regarding the chemical and biological composition of the Anthrax spores recovered from the tainted letters sent to politicians in Washington, claims which pointed a heavy circumstantial finger at Hussain's regime and which if true would have seemed the ultimate "slam-dunk" justification for war.

That they were in fact totally untrue did not hinder ABC from continuing to tout them for weeks afterwards; nor did it prevent right-wing journalists in other organisations from recycling the story through 2002 and beyond. As Glenn Greenwald states in one of his many excellent dissections of ABC's journalism:

At one of the most critical times in American history -- the weeks following the 9/11 and anthrax attacks -- ABC News and Brian Ross published multiple, highly inflammatory reports, aggressively linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks, which turned out to be completely false. Accompanying those false anthrax reports, ABC News frequently linked Saddam to the 9/11 attacks as well -- such as when Cokie Roberts, during an interview with Donald Rumsfeld immediately following one of Ross's Saddam-anthrax stories, referenced "the confirmation that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official."

Glenn produced a whole series of articles on the subject, in particular homing in on ABC's reluctance to even acknowledge the falsity of the initial reports. Though he achieved some partial victory with a grudging admission eventually being extracted from ABC that they had been wrong originally, the company never named those "well-placed" sources who sparked the story off beyond a vague reference to "mistaken" scientists involved in the initial forensic analysis. With this statement it would seem the network giant had closed off any further investigation into who exactly had planted these ideas "at one of the most critical times in American history." As Glenn asserted in another of his posts:

...I never realized this before, but I now see that Brian Ross was, far and away, the journalistic leader and the real pioneer in trying to claim a connection between Saddam and the anthrax attacks (as well as between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks).

If this were true, if Brian Ross and the ABC team really were the well-spring from which all the subsequent Anthrax/Iraq stories emerged into the media, then their stonewalling of Glenn Greenwald's legitimate enquiries would have permanently blocked that avenue from further investigation.

But thankfully this is one instance where Glenn's analysis is wrong, because there was another journalist making even more serious accusations specifying links between Saddam, Anthrax AND 9/11 at exactly the same time - earlier in fact.

Although never picked up on directly by other media outlets in the manner that the ABC bulletins would be, this report can be seen today as a much more highly concentrated manifestation of Bush Administration propaganda - but one that is far more revealing when examined for clues as to the sources of the disinformation campaign.

And such examination raises difficult questions of the journalist who, more so even than Brian Ross, can be seen as the "real pioneer" in claiming links between Saddam, Anthrax and 9/11.

But unlike the ABC reporter, this cheerleader was shouting his lines on the other side of the Atlantic..........



2) A Well-Respected Man.

The journalist's name is Tom Mangold and on the 28th October 2001 (that's 2 days after the initial ABC report was aired) he fronted an edition of the BBC's flagship current affairs programme Panorama entitled Bin Laden's biological threat billed as :

An investigation into the realities behind the prospects of a terrorist strike using biological weapons.

As both co-author of Plague Wars, an acclaimed 1999 study on bio-weapons developments across the world and as a highly experienced and respected BBC reporter, Mangold would have appeared the ideal candidate to responsibly analyse the preparedness of Western nations against such an attack.

On an associated webpage for this particular edition of Panorama he wrote the following preview/synopsis of his report:

Anthrax delivered by letter has caused a shut down of Congress and justified panic in the U.S. postal services. No one knows if Bin Laden did this, but most fear he would if he could..... The horrors of September 11th tested New York's emergency management systems to the full and showed how the city could cope with crisis. The question remains as to how other major cities would cope with the threat of biological attack.

And indeed a significant portion of the actual broadcast would be spent favourably contrasting the preparations made by the authorities in New York with their seemingly amateurish UK equivalents in London.

[By the way New Yorkers will be cheered to know that, according to Mr Mangold's reporting later in this episode, these rigorous preparations would include the following: "The city would have to be isolated. No one could leave, no one could enter. There would be substantial no go ghost areas. Governor's Island, just south of Wall Street, Manhattan would become a mass mortuary, there would be lime pits. In the ensuing looting and panic, martial law would be quickly and firmly imposed. Selected police have already been trained for this, as have national guard units." [my emphasis]

So good luck with that one.......!]

Now the subject matter was undeniably pertinent in the light of what had just been happening in New York. And Mangold does not make any specific claim about Bin Laden being responsible for the Anthrax attack in his highlighted comment above, but is rather posing the obvious "what-if" question of how the British would cope in similar circumstances. Nor does he suggest any direct links with the 9/11 atrocities except to use them as an example of New York's emergency management systems in action.

So what is the big deal here, you ask? From this description the reporter would appear to be taking a reasoned and measured approach to the subject, after all. Well that's what I thought too - until in my researches I stumbled across the BBC transcript of the actual transmission tucked away on an obscure corner of the organisation's website. Because that reveals there was effectively a second programme broadcast that night - one that had an entirely different agenda to the one Mangold outlined above, but an agenda that in retrospect will seem disturbingly familiar.

Analysis of this transcript will throw up some startling revelations about just how early after 9/11 the campaign began to associate Iraq with Bin Laden and bio-terror. It will also raise serious questions over the extent to which Mr Mangold was willing to act as a conduit for official (or unofficial) Intelligence Agency "spin", both in this particular documentary and in his previous work as a news journalist - behaviour that is in marked contrast to the reputation he still possesses in most quarters today as a serious, impartial and trustworthy current affairs reporter.

It will also spark fresh scrutiny of his subsequent testimony to The Hutton Inquiry established to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly (Mangold had interviewed Dr Kelly as a primary source for the Plague Wars book and had been in email correspondence with him until shortly before his death).

Although a key issue examined at these hearings was whether the British Government had deliberately "sexed-up" intelligence reports to present Iraq's weapons capabilities as a bigger threat than they actually were (the infamous "45-minutes to attack" claim that was criticised by fellow reporter Andrew Gilligan) at no point in Mangold's statements to the Inquiry nor in his subsequent media appearances, did he acknowledge a conflict of interest in the generally pro-establishment line that he was taking. For as you will soon see, Tom Mangold's report for Panorama in October 2001 would be about as "sexed-up" about Iraq as you could possibly imagine........



3) Listen, Stop Me If You've Heard This One, But There Were These Two Terrorists.......

[Note: Unless otherwise indicated all the blockquotes that follow are extracted from the BBC transcript. As this is a simple text file with no HTML tags or other markers you may find it easier to keep it open in a separate tab for reference. Any emphasis of text is mine unless otherwise stated.]

Mangold's actual introduction that evening was stark and bleak, even when he wasn't quoting Tony Blair:

TOM MANGOLD: The fear is as old as history. The plague doctor of the middle ages helpless in the continent where disease killed millions. Today the images have returned and with them the fear that disease may walk the land once more. TONY BLAIR: [Speaking in the House of Commons 14 September 2001] We know that they would, if they could, go further and use chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons of mass destruction. We know also that there are groups or people occasionally states who will trade the technology and capability of such weapons. MANGOLD: Could there really be a biological attack by Al Qaeda terrorists and are we ready for it if there is? Tonight Panorama sorts facts from fears and investigates the reality behind six weeks that have shaken the world.... .....three people have been murdered by proxy, another ten infected and thirty-two more exposed. Letters laced with anthrax have closed Congress and sent the US mail service into chaos. The perpetrators remain free. No link has been established to Bin Laden but there is growing evidence in the West of his involvement in the new horror of biological terrorism.

It's a good start, isn't it? Mangold compares the Anthrax attacks to almost a Biblical plague, smoothly segues into a speech made by Tony Blair (only three days after 9/11!) in which he is already talking about Weapons of Mass Destruction, and then floats the possibility Al Qaeda are planning to unleash said plague on the world. So where do you think he starts investigating "the reality" of the situation and the "growing evidence" of Bin Laden's involvement in it? That's right, in Florida, with the 9/11 hi-jackers!:

MANGOLD: A crop dusting plane in central Florida. This unlikely location contains the first real clue that Al Qaeda terrorists were planning something very unusual, even before their September 11th atrocities. This remote airfield in Florida may have been as close as it gets to becoming the focus for the first biological attack by Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists on a mainland city, possibly Miami. The evidence, while circumstantial, points inexorably to the conclusion that this, at the very least, may have been in the minds of the men who subsequently died on September 11th. Last March a group of Middle Eastern men arrived uninvited and unannounced at the airfield. They carried still and video cameras and took pictures of the planes. No one objected to the questions they asked........... We now know the man asking the questions was Mohamed Atta.....what was it about crop dusters that so intrigued (him)? Eight years ago America's Congressional Office of Technology took the threat of biological terrorism seriously enough to use (sic) Washington to show what one crop dusting plane filled with weapons grade anthrax could do.

And said results as described by the chairman of US Public Health Preparedness wouldn't be pretty:

Donald Henderson: With something in the order of 100 kilos of anthrax spores, a good proportion of the population could suffer and die from anthrax depending very much on how it's spread and the efficiency of it.

Now stories of Atta displaying an unhealthy interest in crop dusting planes quickly emerged in the days following 9/11 so it's hardly surprising they would rate a mention here. But as far as I'm aware, nothing definitive was ever proven as to what (if anything) the hi-jackers intended to do with them. Would launching a biological attack have been a more plausible suggestion than say, filling the spray tanks with fuel to use as a flying bomb? Mr Mangold seems to think so but he fails to present any firm evidence here beyond the co-incidence of the Congressional report that hypothesised their use in a bio-weapons delivery system.

Still, given all that had happened in the weeks leading up to his broadcast it is hard to begrudge Tom Mangold speculating in this way, even though he proffers no explanation as to why exactly Atta would drop such a plan despite being "inexorably" fascinated by it. However he will return later to the crop dusters theme from a very surprising and quite probably much less defensible angle. For now though he continues by posing a question to the audience:

MANGOLD: But who in their right mind would ever dream of murdering the civilian population of an entire capital city? One man has admitted he has no moral objections: Osama Bin Laden. "We do not consider it a crime if we have tried to have nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Our Holy Land is occupied by Israeli and American forces. We have the right to defend ourselves liberate our Holy Land" MANGOLD: Nor is this just idle rhetoric......Now western intelligence are joining the dots and looking for patterns. In 1999 spy satellites revealed that Bin Laden's terrorists had primitive biochemical research facilities near the towns of Khoust and Abu Khabab north of Jalalabad. Ahmad Rosan, an Al Qaeda terrorist caught in the United States revealed that Bin Laden was personally interested in using low flying aircraft to dispense biochemical agents. Important evidence then came from Egypt. In June 1999 over 100 hard men from various radical Islamic terrorist cells closely allied with Bin Laden were on trial. One of them, headed the Egyptian Islamic Jihad Military Operations, admitted his group possessed biological weapons for use against numerous American and Israeli targets. He had tried to buy biological weapons in the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.

Reading this passage today one wonders exactly how this one AQ terrorist was persuaded into his "admission" - and was he admitting to possessing weapons or attempting to buy them? If the former why not tell us where he actually got them from as opposed to where he tried to get them from?

But never mind, this clumsy construction leads into a discussion of the grim conditions at former weapons research centres in the former Soviet Union, and a chummy little chat between Mangold and none other than soon to be CIA chief Porter Goss on the risks of weapons proliferation from the former Soviet Bloc (a theme which formed a major section of Mangold's Plague Wars book, in which he drew on experiences that Dr David Kelly described to him when he had inspected these deteriorating facilities in the early Nineties).

However to the casual viewer this sequence would appear a pointless diversion as Mangold concludes it with the following statement:

MANGOLD: There's no firm evidence that Al Qaeda has purchased either scientist or germs from the former Soviet Union but they can still go shopping.

Okay, shopping where, if not Russia?

There are always 250 scientific centres in the United States alone which carry stocks of anthrax and over 1000 sites abroad.

Really? That does sound like a lot of Anthrax doesn't it!

It's a prospect that haunts Western and Eastern leaders today.

Leaders like who exactly? And where exactly would they be going shopping, again? Can you guess, boys and girls?



4) Gimme an I.....Gimme an R.......Gimme an A.......Gimme an Q.......Waddya Got......?

GEORGE ROBERTSON (Secretary General, NATO - 13 September 2001)

There is the credible possibility that terrorists, or what President Putan (sic) called 'rogue states', would use ballistic missile technology to take weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological weapons into the heart of cities.

That's former Defence Secretary to Tony Blair, George Robertson, beating his ex-boss to the punch by a day in flagging the menace from weapons of mass destruction, running with a precursor to the "45 minutes-from-attack" line, though he wasn't yet to know that you could deliver "biological weapons into the heart of cities" quite literally for the cost of a postage stamp. But there's just one thing I don't quite understand about George's warning - who does he mean by "Rogue States"? Could Tom help explain perhaps?

MANGOLD: Rogue States, code for Iraq, one country that has an advanced biological warfare programme. September 11th has renewed the struggle in the West between those who see Iraq's hand behind all Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, and now want a second front against Iraq to finish Saddam off, and those who say there may be circumstantial evidence but no proof, and until then he should be left along. Former CIA boss Jim Woolsey takes the hard view. JIM WOOLSEY Director, CIA, 1994-95

Saddam succeeded in keeping all biological agents and all actual material away from the inspectors, probably so they couldn't analyse it and type it, and he said that he destroyed all of his biological weapons and material for it, and if you believe that, as we say over here, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. MANGOLD: It is undeniable that Saddam Hussein's biological warfare programme was extensive and highly developed by the end of the Gulf War. UN inspectors dredged up what they could and destroyed it but much remained carefully hidden from their prying eyes. To make matters worse, the UN has had no inspectors inside Iraq since 1998, so allowing the biological programme to restart.

So what would the casual viewer have learnt from this report so far? Let's recap shall we, because there's a lot to take in:

Terrorists equate to Rogue States;

Rogue States are prepared to launch WMD attacks against cities to cause mass fatalities;

Iraq is the Rogue State;

Iraq controls all Islamic fundamentalist terrorism;

The only question is whether this can be conclusively proved yet;

Saddam Hussain hid all his biological weapons from inspection and falsely claimed to have destroyed all such material;

Iraq currently has an advanced biological warfare programme;oh, and not forgetting;

The 9/11 hi-jackers had planned to launch a mass Anthrax attack in Florida but decided against it on a whim.



This sort of makes Brian Ross look like Walter Cronkite, doesn't it? Still at least now the tipping point has been reached in Mangold's broadcast we can finally catch a glimpse of one of the prime movers in this disinformation campaign, none other than former CIA chief James "Jim" Woolsey. As outlined by the History Commons Project, Woolsey was a prominent original member of the notorious neo-conservative group the Project for a New American Century, and pre-9/11 had already made extraordinary efforts to prove an always implausible conspiracy theory that linked Saddam Hussain to the first bombing attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993.

Now he was doing exactly the same with the 2001 plot, to the extent of travelling to the UK without informing either US or UK officials of his trip in a blatant breach of protocol. To quote from the History Commons article describing his activities in October 2001:

Former CIA Director James Woolsey makes a secret trip to Europe to find evidence that could link the Iraqi government to various terrorist attacks. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz funds and supports his trip. He visits Wales in a fruitless search for evidence to link Iraq to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing ... But he also looks for evidence tying Iraq to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks once they become publicly known in early October. The Village Voice will later report, "Woolsey was also asked to make contact with Iraqi exiles and others who might be able to beef up the case that hijacker Mohamed Atta was working with Iraqi intelligence to plan the September 11 attacks, as well as the subsequent anthrax mailings."..... It is unknown exactly what Woolsey does in Europe, but his trip has an apparent effect on the media. In addition to numerous articles about Atta’s alleged Prague visit, some articles appear attempting to tie Atta and the Iraqi government to the anthrax attacks as well.....But no hard evidence will emerge supporting any of these allegations pushed by Woolsey.

Although several examples of these articles are cited, including on-the-record newspaper interviews with Woolsey, this BBC broadcast is, I believe the first (and only?) time that he is seen making these statements on camera. Though it is unclear when exactly the interview took place, what seems undeniable is the fact that James Woolsey was an active operator in the propaganda campaign against Iraq from its earliest days - and he had found a willing and uncritical partner to assist him in Tom Mangold.

But while you might think by now this report has already gone the extra mile to "prove" links between Anthrax, Iraq and 9/11, Tom Mangold is only just getting into his stride. Join me in Part Two for the next exciting instalment as I discuss the Last of the Red Hand Gang.......