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New Scientific Evidence Emerges In Anthrax Case
sciencehabit writes "A Science Magazine investigation uses clues from a key document unveiled last week to reconstruct the trail that led the FBI to Bruce Ivins. Among the revelations: Anthrax fingerprinting was not critical to the investigation, as many reports have suggested. Rather, brute-force genetic sequencing, with the help of the J. Craig Venter Institute, helped crack the case. New potential motivations by Ivins are also revealed."
It assumes competence. I could see something on the level of say, an anthrax attack being possible to arrange with a minimum amount of people involved. Most of the other events you mention would require too many participants to enforce secrecy. I've worked in classified settings for the government, and not to denigrate my coworkers in the least, but secrecy within an organization is a joke. While external secrecy is fairly good, the secrets aren't morally outrageous. I somehow doubt people would take their oaths particularly seriously if they discovered the U.S. government organized any of the above events.
Now if you want to argue that it was a sin of inaction, that someone high up knew an attack was coming and chose to do nothing, that might be plausible, since less people would need to be involved. I wouldn't rule it out completely, though my faith in humanity would be shattered if it were the case. I'm not inclined to believe even that much.
Personally, I think the attacks were unexpected. The people you accuse of conspiracy did not aid them in any way, they just took obscene advantage of the situation.
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So if we base a clever article on a leaked document, shouldn't we first assume that the document is truthful?
When a high-profile person commits suicide because of the pressure of an investigation, the authorities will always try to justify their action. This was observed many times. I do remember a big scandal where a perfectly honest corner shop owner was investigated by the IRS and harassed in the worst possible ways. He turned out that his books were perfectly clean, but there was nevertheless an attempt at a smear campaign against the poor guy after his death.
I am sure that this suicide is embarrassing some higher-ups at the FBI and that they will do their best to avoid being blamed.
So I'd take these revelations with a grain of salt.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Not really, it only implies someone thought an attack using anthrax was possible. In other it means nothing except someone was intelligent enough to realize anthrax was a plausible biological weapon. Conspiracy theories exist because human brains are pattern matching machines and if you look enough at something you'll find some form of pattern by pure chance. Science and statistics exist because someone realized that without rigorous standards the conclusion we draw are often less than worthless.
That was the worst straw-man argument I have ever read.
The parent post simply stated that the people in power wouldn't mind a few innocent people dieing if it served The Greater Good.
Obviously, this is the truth considering the US has been killing innocent people in Iraq for years now - all in the name of The Greater Good.