Glenn Greenwald: Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation. The evident suicide of government scientist Bruce Ivins has brought the post-9/11 anthrax scare back into the news. I haven't sorted through it, but this looks like a good place to start. This is often forgotten now, but at the time the antrax attacks were very important in driving Americans to a post-9/11 war footing. I remember watching some pundit on TV opine that there's no question but that sooner or later terrorists will attack the US with biological weapons; the only question is when. That question was answered within days of being asked. The coincidence has never been lost on me. It's like the attacks were custom ordered for the moment, and the effect was to build a siege mentality where 9/11 itself was rapidly fading into history as an isolated event. The attacks in turn led to an orgy of panic: especially when people started to think about the sorts of things that would have to be done to protect large buildings and the mail system from future attacks. But then the attacks stopped, just before we toted up the bill and decided that we couldn't afford anthrax protection. If you're a terrorist, is that the moment you'd halt the assault? I'm not an especially paranoid sort, but that always struck me as very suspicious.