Sure, that fail was funny. But there was one from a now-distant past that isn’t and it’s not as well known as other failures like Ruby Ridge, Richard Jewel and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing (Clint Eastwood’s movie about it superb), and the 9/11 attacks, plus subsequent attacks – and the memory loss is because it happened in the wake of those attacks and because it involved two men directly involved decades later in the Trump-Russia collusion bullshit, Robert Mueller and James Comey.
In the months after the 9/11 attacks Washington D.C, in fact all of America, was pretty jumpy; they expected another terrorist attack or perhaps a wave of them. In late 2001 they got it in a truly frightening fashion with a biological warfare attack.
Letters containing anthrax were sent to people in Washington D.C. and they worked as intended; seventeen people were infected, five people died, the Capitol buildings were all shut down again and so was the entire D.C. mail system.
The FBI were on the case immediately of course, as everybody expected, and they quickly focused on an American scientist named Steven Hatfill: Clark Cannon at the Orange County Register takes up the story:
[T]he bureau was bullied into focusing on the government scientist by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy (whose office, along with that of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, was targeted by an anthrax-laced letter) and was duped into focusing on Hatfill by two sources — a conspiracy-minded college professor with a political agenda who’d never met Hatfill and by Nicholas Kristof, who put [the] conspiracy theories in the paper while mocking the FBI for not arresting Hatfill.
There were some obvious problems right from the outset with choosing Hatfill as a suspect: for a start he was a virologist who’d never handled anthrax, which is a bacterium. But the FBI decided to throw a Hail Mary pass…
…importing two bloodhounds from California whose handlers claimed could sniff the scent of the killer on the anthrax-tainted letters. These dogs were shown to Hatfill, who promptly petted them. When the dogs responded favorably, their handlers told the FBI that they’d “alerted” on Hatfill and that he must be the killer.
You’d think that any good FBI agent would have kicked these quacks in the fanny and found their dogs a good home. Or at least checked news accounts of criminal cases in California where these same dogs had been used against defendants who’d been convicted — and later exonerated. As Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times investigative reporter David Willman detailed in his authoritative book on the case, a California judge who’d tossed out a murder conviction based on these sketchy canines called the prosecution’s dog handler “as biased as any witness that this court has ever seen.”
But both Mueller and Comey told President Bush and others in the Administration that the FBI had their man. In fact they didn’t and not only did further evidence – much of it gathered not by the FBI but by Hatfil’s defence lawyers – finally clear him, it turned out that there was another suspect who had been right under their noses the whole time with flashing red lights:
Despite the jihadist slogans accompanying the mailed anthrax, it had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or any foreign element; the FBI ignored a 2002 tip from a scientific colleague of the actual anthrax killer, who turned out to be a Fort Detrick [a biowarfare site] scientist named Bruce Edwards Ivins.
…
Ivins, by contrast, shared ownership of anthrax patents, was diagnosed as having paranoid personality disorder, and had a habit of stalking and threatening people with anonymous letters — including the woman who provided the long-ignored tip to the FBI.
With the FBI finally on his tail years later Ivins would eventually kill himself in 2008, while taxpayers paid Hatfill $5.82 million in compensation for the arrogant stupidity of the FBI, including most especially Mueller and Comey, who have never apologised to Hatfil or expressed any regret about the case.
Keep this in mind about the FBI when you read of their involvement in numerous cases, ranging from the earlier ones mentioned at the start of this post to the hundreds of J6 arrests and prosecutions, to anti-abortion protestors being arrested in the dead of night by FBI SWAT teams, to the raid on Trump’s home at Mar a Lago in Florida.
Also take a look at these stories – based on whistleblowers and their own Inspector General’s investigations – about how the FBI has treated its own staff on matters of religion, politics (meaning Trump supporters) and the C-19 vaccine, including destroying their employment opportunities with other government agencies by pulling their security clearance as punishment before any crime had been proven.
The FBI needs to be disbanded.
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No Minister 
The 20001 AMERITHRAX incident and investigation is one helluva rabbit hole to go down, a series of nested conspiracies with so many mind-blowing elements it’s hard to know which the worst or even which ones is are in the top 10.
It’s probably the admission by the US federal government that a fatal biowarfare attack against the US federal government originated from a US Federal employee working in a US federal laboratory.
That Bruce Ivins was investigated for years but died before he faced a public court would also be one.
That a man with a paranoid personality disorder was working with anthrax for years in a government facility would be another one, (you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!).
But one shocking fact that has been ignored is that the Amerithrax investigation shows that the US government had been secretly developing an offensive bio-weapons program for years, in violation of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
I think that the point of The American led Rules Based International Order, is not so much that America is allowed make the rules and break the rules, it’s that it’s very important that no one ever knows when they break the rules or can punish them when they do.
I too scoff at the claim that Fort Detrick went from being a “biological weapons program” to “biological defense program“: it’s spin, PR, propaganda, etc.
But in my case it’s because I don’t think there’s much of a difference in playing defence or offence. In order to defend you have to understand how to attack.
Given the nature of biowarfare they can’t even say that they’re not “building” weapons as they could with chemical weapons or (if they wanted to) nuclear weapons, because every time you craft a virus or bacterium that can kill people so you can figure out a way to stop it, you’ve created a weapon.
Same type of thinking that was involved in the Fauci-Daszak GM research on corona viruses in labs like the Wuhan one.
There is quite a good book called: “A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare” by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman.
One of the things that they say is that despite the USA being only too happy to pursue all and any weapons, biological warfare has never been that high on their agenda. Not for any particular moral reasons, it’s just that they never pursued it as aggressively. Very similar to how Nazi Germany never pursued gas weapsons particularly hard (the thought being the Hitler having been gassed in WW1 wasn’t a fan. The irony of that of course seemed to escape him when it came to Zyklon B)
Another interesting read is the book by Ken Alibek about the Soviet Unions biological programme.
The British seem really quite keen on chasing biological weapons.
Yeah. I read it years ago but also wrote an article last year that was partly about it, Leftist Myths on the Iraq Invasion.
In that article I referred to the second edition, published in August 2002, which contained an update around Saddam’s WMD efforts in the late 1990’s/early 2000’s:
Which was all fine – until it became obvious in 2002 that the US was cranking up to invade Iraq, using WMD as the primary reason, whereupon Jeremy Paxman did a 180. Just three years later, in late 2004, he would produce a program called The Power of Nightmares to argue that it had all been made up.
As one writer noted about this:
yes I do remember although I read it before the amendments. There is no doubt that saddam hussein did use some less then savoury weapons, but as you say the whole WMD myth has long since been exposed.
poor Colin Powell having to swallow that every day
And although Bush and Powell have to carry the can I’ve never accepted that it was their “manipulations”. The story, confirmed by multiple people, was that the then head of the CIA, a hangover from the Clinton administration, told Bush that the intelligence supporting the case for Saddam’s WMD’s was “a slam dunk”.
Frankly the CIA, like the FBI, should have been regarded as not fit for purpose after the 9/11 attacks, ripped apart and new bodies created. Instead Bush just did his moderate conservative thing and created a whole new layer of bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security, to drape over the whole rotten lot.
I always felt a little sorry for Colin Powell. He either toed the line and became the salesman for “WMD” knowing it was a lie and was going to come out. Or he stood his ground and said “no”. Either way it was career suicide.
And looking at the short sighted damage they have done in their history I would say the CIA haven’t been fit for purpose for a very long time. Their nonsense has done more damage to USA foreign policy then any politician and now they are blamed and used as a convenient excuse by other countries for everything (see “CIA coup in Ukraine” as an example that the idiots on TDB spout constantly courtesy of the much more intelligent and competent Russian intelligence services)
I thought the column was about the character in “King Ralph” called “Anthrax”.
I’m still not completely sure, even after “Anthrax” turned out to be a good guy 😉