The letters were sent a week after 9/11, and as Glenn Greenwald notes here, played a crucial role in helping to convince a country already terrified and numb that Something Must Be Done:

The letter sent to Leahy contained this message:

We have anthrax.You die now.

Are you afraid?

Death to America.

Death to Israel.

Allah is great.

By design, those attacks put the American population into a state of intense fear of Islamic terrorism, far more than the 9/11 attacks alone could have accomplished.

And so today, we see reports that a Maryland anthrax/bioweapons researcher who was apparently about to be linked to the case by investigators has committed suicide.

Let’s use “suicide” in quotes because it’s always so convenient when such folks perish before they’re able to tell any tales out of school.

As Greenwald goes on to note, the anthrax attacks were in fact a key part of the case against Saddam Hussein; ABC News in particular claimed that the anthrax was laced with Bentonite - which means Iraq was involved, becuase Iraq was the only country that used Bentonite to produce biological weapons.

Only, there never was any Bentonite. ABC admitted as much in 2007 - and it’s not that initial tests showed there was Bentonite, and later tests revealed there actually wasn’t; Bentonite was never actually detected in the first place:

That means that ABC News’ “four well-placed and separate sources” fed them information that was completely false — false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein …

<snip>

Clearly, Ross’ allegedly four separate sources had to have some specific knowledge of the tests conducted and, if they were really “well-placed,” one would presume that meant they had some connection to the laboratory where the tests were conducted — Ft. Detrick. That means that the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.

It’s extremely possible — one could say highly likely — that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them. What we know for certain — as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax — is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims.

So a single, rogue scientist was behind this? Concocted the whole Bentonite business? Watch, now, because that’s the story we’re about to be told.

But a single rogue scientist doesn’t attempt to influence global geopolitical events in this manner. Greenwald’s overall point is that there are people associated at some level with our government who very much wanted war with Iraq, and that this incident was one of several keys to them getting that war. ABC News, he notes, knows who this is - knows who those “high-placed sources” are; knows who fed them false information, possibly knowingly. But they’ve never been revealed. Seven years and one war later, they never will be.

Who remembers anthrax? Don’t trouble yourself. It’s going down the memory hole right as we speak.