{"id":400,"date":"2008-08-03T14:08:14","date_gmt":"2008-08-03T21:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=400"},"modified":"2008-08-03T20:18:23","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T03:18:23","slug":"the-anthrax-assassin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=400","title":{"rendered":"The Anthrax Assassin"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are meant to think<\/a>, apparently, that Bruce Ivins, the civilian US Army scientist who committed suicide after becoming the FBI’s main suspect in the 2001 anthrax killings<\/a>, was guilty.\u00a0 He was an insider, he had access to anthrax, he was brilliant but troubled, he had a long history of making homicidal threats, he exhibited unusual behavior, he was emotionally unstable, he had stalked a woman, he was sociopathic.<\/p>\n

All of which may be true.\u00a0 But . . . remember all the things they said about the man\u00a0British police shot dead in a London subway station back in 2005?\u00a0 An early Washington Post article<\/a> summed up the known facts: he was South Asian or Asian, he may have been Muslim, he was wearing a thick coat, he was linked to the subway bombings that had occured the day before, he had emerged from a residence that was under surveillance, he had spotted the policemen following him and fled into the tube station, he had vaulted over barriers.\u00a0 Lots of specifics, all of them damning.<\/p>\n

But then a funny thing happened . . . the known facts changed, as this\u00a0follow-on Washington Post article<\/a> points out: the man was Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian.\u00a0 He wasn’t Muslim.\u00a0 He wasn’t wearing a thick coat.\u00a0 The link to the previous day’s subway bombings turned out to be an unfortunate coincidence: Menezes had emerged from an apartment complex that was under surveillance because a suspect in the subway bombings lived there.\u00a0 He was unaware of the policemen following him.\u00a0 He didn’t flee into the tube station, he entered it like anyone else planning to catch the subway.\u00a0 He didn’t vault over any barriers.<\/p>\n

Have we found the anthrax assassin?\u00a0 I think I’ll wait until the facts settle down before I pass judgment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are meant to think, apparently, that Bruce Ivins, the civilian US Army scientist who committed suicide after becoming the FBI’s main suspect in the 2001 anthrax killings, was guilty.\u00a0 He was an insider, he had access to anthrax, he was brilliant but troubled, he had a long history of making homicidal threats, he exhibited […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,10,16,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-current-events","category-media","category-terrorism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":405,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions\/405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}