Nearly 7 years ago John McCain did indeed say during a televised interview that the anthrax in the letters sent around shortly after 9/11 “may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.”
Of course it didn’t. It looks now as if the deadly anthrax letters — 5 people ultimately succumbed — were sent by a bona fide mad scientist, one Bruce E. Ivins. Ivins killed himself on July 29, as the feds were finally closing in.
Here’s the funny thing about John McCain: he’s been singing a similar tune about Iraq and weaponized bugs since 1989.
An article titled, “Iraq may have gotten bacteria from US lab” was published in the Washington Post on January 29, 1989.
The article quoted a speech in which John McCain said the following: “[We] know that Iraq has already misused international agreements to obtain tularemia from the U.S… . We have every reason to assume that Iraq may soon weaponize two of the three most lethal biotoxins - anthrax and tularemia.”
McCain also wrote a letter to then Sec. of State James Baker. His letter purportedly detailed the charges and evidence supporting his claims about the biotoxins and their connection back to a U.S. lab, but McCain “refused to divulge” (the Post’s words) the evidence for public consumption.
Just over a year and a half later, the first Gulf War began.
After the brief war was over, a United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) did find some evidence of biological weapons in Iraq, but there was never any evidence that those weapons played a major role in the war.
If anything, vaccines administered for fear of Sadam’s legions of lethal bugs may have been more damaging. While the existence of Gulf War Syndrome is disputed by some, those who believe it exists consistently point to possible causes like the anthrax vaccine administered to soldiers in the Persian Gulf theater.
According to Vaccine-A, a book by journalist Gary Matsumoto, thousands of Gulf War troops were, unbeknownst to them, given an experimental anthrax vaccine.
As Chapter 3 of Matsumoto’s book reveals, one of the principal researchers behind Vaccine A, a possible cause of Gulf War Syndrome, was Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, now known as the guy who may have sent the anthrax letters.
So we have 1989, and Sen. John McCain, pretexting the first war in the Gulf with allegations of biological weaponry. Weaponry that may have been somehow sent from America to Iraq.
Nearly 12 years later, the worst terrorist attack in American history has struck, and McCain is back. This time he’s on a much more public stage, Late Night With David Letterman. Using that platform, McCain once again — this time in what seems to be almost a jocular fashion — pretexts a new war with Iraq — using pretty much the same pretext he’d used in 1989.
And now we know that one of the people behind the very vaccine that may have laid low veterans of the first Gulf conflict, even if they never came near munitions, was most likely behind the letters that gave McCain a new excuse to pretext in 2001.
There’s an awful symmetry to it all.
On McCain’s part, the pretexts are unsettling. They seem intentional, deliberate.
For a man who constantly declares in stump speeches that he knows all too well the costs of war, he seems far too comfortable trying to lay the groundwork for these events.
He no longer seems as benign as he once did, with his avuncular voice and unaffected manner. Now, I find it hard to look at John McCain and not acknowledge the avid hawk beneath the grandfatherly veneer.
