What a strange few weeks,do you think Obama can go all the way?…

sorry for not getting back sooner, but my acquaintance just got back to me today. This person worked at USAMRIID for a significant amount of time in the 90’s.

Entrance to individual lab suites was restricted using PINs, but there were a significant number of individuals who may have PINs for any given suite (20-50 people in the suite he worked in, which was not where the anthrax was handled, which was BL4 - highest level of containment, so I’m guessing proportionally fewer people). At that time the PINs were the only level of security within the buildings. Since then searches of bags and other measures have been instituted.

His last comment was “I hope they have got that situation under control now.”

Not much more info than that since it had been some time since his employment there. He was not surprised to hear that the bug had come from there. And didn’t comment when I mentioned that I was surprised it had taken this long for the FBI to focus on it.

I think the topic’s pretty well petered out and LWM and I have pretty well identified our areas of agreement and disagreement, so it’s probably just as well not to hijack the thread any further.

I will go so far as to agree that there’s reasonable doubt as to just how much daylight there was between FDR and his policy apparatus, although I believe he was influenced by them to a considerable extent. I also cheerfully acknowledge the Japanese government had some over-the-top types of its own. Their counterinsurgency technique in Manchuria, as Chomsky pointed out, could have been the prototype for America’s strategic hamlets and free-fire zones thirty years later.

Kevin… In any case, there is overwhelming evidence that, because the American corporate economy had become organized organized on the basis of “export-dependent monopoly capitalism,” leading corporate and state elites had perceived that the prime directive of American foreign policy was to secure open markets for surplus output–by any means necessary. The overall theme of foreign policy, therefore, was what William A. Williams called “Open Door Empire.”

I would just suggest to Kevin that hardliners are found in every nation with imperial designs — the Japanese were no exception — and as Gareth Porter and Bacevich have observed, presidents are increasingly less in control of this apparatus than we realize:

In either case, at least since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, Americans have assumed that the occupant of the Oval Office actually runs the show–that Presidents command the loyalty of their subordinates, exercise effective control over their Administration and make decisions that others faithfully implement. Perils of Dominance suggests that this model is largely a fiction. All three Presidents considered in this study engaged in a continuous struggle to retain the reins of authority. Of the three, only Eisenhower achieved even a modicum of success. In each case, as Porter notes, “the national security bureaucracy acted as an independent power center within the US government with the right to pressure the president on matters of war and peace.”

The political competition that gets all the ink is the visible one pitting Democrats against Republicans.
The competition that matters is the largely hidden one between Presidents ultimately accountable to the people and “unelected national security managers” accountable to no one. These national security chieftains constitute a sort of permanent war party. When hawking their wares, they speak movingly of their commitment to freedom, democracy and human rights. When they step away from the podium and the TV cameras, values take a back seat to considerations of power.

If war is a continuation of politics by other means, and everyone had read Clausewitz back then, it could just as easily have been a case of people on either side pushing the envelope a little too hard. There were competing interests that led to conflict. Armed conflict.

TGGP,

It was a joke. Snark. I suppose you didn’t get it.

I considered posting a separate one, but if LWM and Kevin — or anyone else — wants to go OT here, that is fine with me, and less disruptive of the conversation(s) already begun.

I would argue that FDR was looking *a lot harder* for an excuse for war with Japan by about 1940 or so.

The notion of a Grand Area (the minimal assortment regional markets and natural resources that would have to be integrated into the American corporate economy for it to survive) was formulated after the fall of France and the Benelux countries, and when Japan was showing immediate designs on French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies.

The idea was that the “Grand Area” would have to include, as an absolute minimum, Latin America, the British Empire, and the Western Pacific. Hitler had withdrawn the markets of western Europe into the autarkic economy of Fortress Europa. Senior planners in the State Department feared that, if Britain fell, Germany would capture a major part of the Royal Navy in the process–and with it some part of the former Empire. And meanwhile, Japan was showing every sign of incorporating the rubber and tin of Indochina and the oil of Indonesia into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

If you read the Shoup and Minter article I linked, you’ll find this isn’t just intepretive speculation on their part. It’s backed up with many, many archival documents showing that this is what senior policy makers in the State Department were saying, almost word for word.

In any case, there is overwhelming evidence that, because the American corporate economy had become organized organized on the basis of “export-dependent monopoly capitalism,” leading corporate and state elites had perceived that the prime directive of American foreign policy was to secure open markets for surplus output–by any means necessary. The overall theme of foreign policy, therefore, was what William A. Williams called “Open Door Empire.”

Hello TGGP. I’ve seen that handle around.

We tried this with religion, didn’t we?

I think I remember seeing your handle before, but I don’t remember discussing religion with you.

I hadn’t had my coffee yet. Sorry for the OT post (again).

We should move this to the proper thread.

No Treason disappeared for a while, but it’s back now. It’s still infrequently updated. A favorite anarchist find of mine somewhat recently was AgainstPolitics.com which has gone down. However, I made a copy.

Hello TGGP. I’ve seen that handle around.

We tried this with religion, didn’t we?

Was I not civil in my defense of the ladies of the night, Mona?

Alas, poor Eliot.

Kevin,

I think I see where you are coming from. As Mona says, you are “wicked smart” so you didn’t mention any names I can really object to. My question would be: If FDR wanted an excuse for war with Japan, why not the bombing, strafing and sinking of the U.S.S. Panay on the Yangtze River in 1937? It was the perfect opportunity. It wasn’t a spark igniting a coal bunker or a mine. It was Japanese warplanes and they were even filmed by a newsreel camera team that had been on the vessel, abandone ship and made it to shore in time to film the ship go down. That is ready made war propaganda.

http://www.hmsfalcon.com/Panay/Panay.htm

LWM, on the revisionist version of the pre-Pearl Harbor period, probably the single best source is Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, “Shaping a New World Order: The Council on Foreign Relations’ Blueprint for World Hegemony, 1939-1945,” in Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism. Despite the lurid title, the article is heavily documented from archival sources and adheres pretty closely to the standards of academic history. It’s ideal as an introduction because it states the historical arguments quite well and it’s readable at one sitting. You can get a pretty good idea from Shoup and Minter’s argument and their sources as to whether you’re likely to be convinced by the revisionist case, or whether it’s a waste of time pursuing it further. You can read it at Questia: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=99208192

I should have stipulated that FDR’s dick-waving was entirely figurative (so far as I know).

Probably the best single source on the imperial rivalry between the Allied powers late in WWII, and America’s broad design for a postwar world, is Gabriel Kolko’s The Politics of War.

The big daddy of all revisionist history reading lists was compiled by Joseph Stromberg. You can find it somewhere in his archives at LewRockwell.Com….

Thoreau,

Unfortunately, your description sounds EXACTLY like the “security measures” taken after 9-11 at a VA hospital where I worked. Their whole focus was not on actually preventing a terrorist attack, but on having a policy on paper that would get even more clueless bureaucrats in the Departmental hierachy off their backs, and carry some PR value in the local community.

Come to think of it, it’s an awful lot like the self-congratulatory official happy talk spouted at the for-profit hospital where I work now. The official happy talk response to MRSA is to post “Achtung! Wash Your Hands!” signs all over the place, and to hold endless in-service meetings (when the real cause of spreading infections and most other adverse events is dangerous levels of understaffing).

Generally speaking, their approach to every imaginable issue is to have a written policy on how vitally important it is, while not spending a friggin’ penny on it. “At [hospital name], our aim is to provide extraordinary patient care, to be renowned for going above and beyond to serve the needs of the community, and to meet and exceed expectations. That’s why you’ll be on a ward with one orderly for thirty patients, go five days without a bath or linen change, and shit the bed waiting an hour for a bedpan.”

I’m a physicist. These days I mostly do calculations, but I used to work in labs. I do some work in optics, and some work in mathematical models of growth factor transport in tissue. I teach in a large undergraduate department (well, large by physics standards) at a university that emphasizes technical and professional programs.

“Being of the opinion that music without instruments (drum machines and synths don’t count) is all crap, I am largely in agreement.”

It’s on now homey! Electronic music is my bread and butter (apart from politics).

He is wicked smart. But he’s a free market anti-capitalist mutualist! I do read his blog, however. As an anarchist, he is going to have those views that some anarchists have. I don’t know what happened to the guys at No Treason. Somebody dropped them on their heads. Perhaps tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep, I will traipse around the new digs. Can we have LibWars here unmolested?

I understand your frustration with “safetycrats”, and have had my share of experiences with them as well, but I would never advocate doing away with inspections that are properly conducted and focussed.

BTW, if they are handling these organisms inside fume hoods, then they are in HUGE violation of the rules. These bugs have to be handled in biosafety cabinets, a very different animal indeed.
;->

I believe it, about people carrying dangerous stuff around with no regard for safety. But if it was reported, the inspectors would probably come in and levy a fine because the fume hood isn’t covered in stickers alerting people to the contents of the fume hood (never mind that putting in all of the requisite stickers would make it impossible to see through the window). Or levy a fine because they turned on a machine to test the safety device, when they weren’t supposed to turn it on until the safety device had been tested.

I hates me some safetycrats.

That reminds me of an absurdity that almost destroyed a fine man’s career, in a other context. He ran a program for developmentally disabled adults living in multiple group homes. Occasionally he worked doing direct care, to stay in touch, and one morning he found one of the residents in rigor mortis, with lividity, stone cold, and quite clearly DEAD.

He was almost fired for failing to give CPR until the ambulance arrived, because since he is not a doctor, he cannot determine the resident is dead. Granted, you do not want staff in such institutions second-guessing physicians — but an intelligent person just effing knows a corpse when s/he encounters it. This was not a violation of, as the state health code puts it, “recipient rights.” The older resident had just simply died, as was obvious to anyone with a double-digit IQ.

But since then, all staff are told even if the corpse is rotting, you do CPR until the ambulance gets there.

WRT Thoreau’s comment, prior to 9/11 and these attacks, it was not uncommon for researchers to be fairly blase about security. All requirements to inventory these kinds of bugs are post that time.

I don’t know the actual rules that were in place in labs such as that at Ft. Detrick, and would hope that they would be very stringent because there are so many dangerous pathogens being used there, but it would also not surprise me to find that adherence was not strictly policed. Cutting corners is, after all, very human behavior. And I personally know of researchers who carried cultures of multi-drug resistant M.tb. on airplanes in their pockets back in the “old days”. Literally raised my hair when I heard that one.

The Saddam- specific line was the same BS they were feeding us about everything else Iraq back then and later. It’s on a par with McCain’s current Iran-al Qaeda conflation. It was garbage and I believe they were as fully aware of that as they were that Saddam wasn’t buying uranium in Niger.

Wiki is like the internets, or almost any library (except that in the library people can only tear pages out, not add or edit them).

I’m looking at you Sandy Berger!

I always read the talk page and you just have to check the footnotes and let common sense and your own “smarts” be your guide. You can find books in any library, written by Ph.D.s no less, with crazier and less reliable information. Everyone has an agenda and some propaganda to catapult. Wiki is hardly the only place that happens. If anything, the open source model tends to keep it more “honest”. It’s just basic reference. I was about to get into it on another thread here with someone who’s blog I like but decided against it. Kevin C. He’s got his ideas about FDR and Japan and WWII and I have mine. I can only imagine what crackpot revisionist historians he’s been reading. FDR waving his dick around the Pacific? That made me laugh. In my view, there are no white hats but I don’t see black hats, either. One of these books on the subject is even a revisionist history.

http://www.amazon.com/Threshold-War-Franklin-Roosevelt-American/dp/0195061683

http://www.amazon.com/Going-Japan-1937-1941-Jonathan-Utley/dp/0870494457

http://www.amazon.com/Road-War-Revised-Richard-Overy/dp/014028530X

The whole thing with the Japanese goes as far back as TR anyway.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/trjapan.htm

It’s difficult to ascribe blame just based on FDR’s policies. Gen. Billy Mitchell saw it coming and predicted it in 1922. America was not the only imperial power around back then. Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

For instance, when some hard drives with classified data went missing at Los Alamos (turned out they were behind a cabinet), a friend who used to work there told me that the place was shut down, even areas “outside the fence” (i.e. areas where non-classified work is done), and the inquisitors went looking for rules violations rather than hard drives.

More generally, science labs are full of minor rules violations because to actually comply with each and every safety rule would make work almost impossible. Generally people know what is safe and what is unsafe, but when the useful information has to be propagated informally (because the official manuals leave no room for common sense) it’s inevitable that now and then something will slip. And when it does, the inquisitors come down hard on things that have nothing to do with actual safety, and probably punish the innocent and the guilty alike. The fear of that response probably leads some people to keep quiet about things that they really ought to say something about. And the actions of the safetycrats fail to cultivate meaningful respect for safety rules.

Given all that, it would not surprise me in the least if corners get cut at Ft. Dettrick. Most of the corner cuttings are probably harmless, but because of the way that dumb rules are mixed with good ones to undermine respect for rules, the end result is that eventually somebody ignores a rule that they actually should have followed.

And god knows, I’m no biologist and so I have no clue either. But I STILL want to know how it could have taken the FBI this long, when there is such a limited pool of suspects for American-derived anthrax, to solve this case? And why was the public initially told it was a Saddam-specific strain?

Anything you can add, however is welcome. Email GG and he will forward to me anything any source of yours is willing to have published, anon or not. I’ll reply to you directly first, if you would prefer that. GG often forwards me stuff from folks since I am a wuss about having my email addy just “out there.”

I believe I know someone who worked at Ft. Detrick in the lab while in the Army. I have emailed him the original story to get his input.

LWM is correct that strains are often sent to other research sites, but that still would not necessarily account for the level of weaponization, something that is not easily achievable at that level of sophistication. Anthrax particles like to clump. It isn’t easy to get them airborne in sufficient quantities to ensure pulmoary anthrax infections. I have no idea if the other sites with this strain were capable of weaponizing.

Just some additional thoughts to ponder…