The 2001 anthrax attacks, also known as Amerithrax from its FBI case name,[3] occurred in the United States over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001, one week after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and to Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, killing five people and infecting 17 others. A copycat hoax letter containing harmless white powder was opened by reporter Judith Miller in The New York Times newsroom.[4][5] According to the FBI, the ensuing investigation became "one of the largest and most complex in the history of law enforcement".
A major focus in the early years of the investigation was bioweapons expert Steven Hatfill, who was eventually exonerated. Bruce Edwards Ivins, a scientist at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, became a focus around April 4, 2005. On April 11, 2007, Ivins was put under periodic surveillance and an FBI document stated that he was "an extremely sensitive suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks".[7] On July 29, 2008, Ivins committed suicide with an overdose of acetaminophen.
Immediately after the anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressured FBI DirectorRobert Mueller to prove that they were a second-wave assault by al-Qaeda following the September 11 attacks. During the president's morning intelligence briefings, Mueller was "beaten up" for not producing proof that the killer spores were the handiwork of Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide. "They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East," the retired senior FBI official stated. The FBI knew early on that the anthrax used was of a consistency requiring sophisticated equipment and was unlikely to have been produced in "some cave". At the same time, President Bush and Vice President Cheney in public statements speculated about the possibility of a link between the anthrax attacks and Al Qaeda.[84]The Guardian reported in early October that American scientists had implicated Iraq as the source of the anthrax,[85] and the next day The Wall Street Journal editorialized that Al Qaeda perpetrated the mailings, with Iraq the source of the anthrax.[86] A few days later, John McCain suggested on the Late Show with David Letterman that the anthrax may have come from Iraq,[87] and the next week ABC News did a series of reports stating that three or four (depending on the report) sources had identified bentonite as an ingredient in the anthrax preparations, implicating Iraq.[70][71][88]
Statements by the White House[72] and public officials[73] quickly proved that there was no bentonite in the attack anthrax. "No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened."[89] Nonetheless, a few conservative journalists repeated ABC's bentonite report for several years,[90][91] even after the invasion of Iraq, as evidence that Saddam Hussein not only possessed "weapons of mass destruction", but had used them in attacks on the United States.
