WTF Is It Now?!?

George Monbiot b!tch-slaps the Incompetant Ignoramus Administration

"[W]hile we should be asking what George Bush and his cabinet knew and failed to respond to before September 11, we should also be exploring another, related, question: what do they know now and yet still refuse to act upon? Another way of asking the question is this: whatever happened to the anthrax investigation?

"Last week, I phoned the FBI. Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? "The investigation is continuing," the spokesman replied. "Has it gone cold because it has led you to a government office?" I asked. He put down the phone.

"Had he stayed on the line, I would have asked him about a few other offences the FBI might wish to consider. The army's development of weaponised anthrax, for example, directly contravenes both the biological weapons convention and domestic law. So does its plan to test live microbes in "aerosol chambers" at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modified fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces. These, as the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to be just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research programmes which the US government has secretly funded. Several prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation is being pursued with less than the rigour we might have expected because the federal authorities have something to hide.

"The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation for failure."