| March 16, 2005 | - The Department of Homeland Security was preparing for: the detonation of a ten-kiloton nuclear device; a biological attack with aerosolized anthrax; an outbreak of pneumonic plague; a flu pandemic starting in south China; the spraying of a chemical blister agent over a football stadium; an attack on an oil refinery; the explosion of a tank of chlorine; a 7.2-magnitude earthquake; a major hurricane in a metropolitan area; three Cesium-137 dirty bombs going off in three different cities, each contaminating thirty-six city blocks; the detonation of improvised bombs in sports stadiums and emergency rooms; liquid anthrax in ground beef; a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak; and a cyber attack on the nation's financial infrastructure.
| Source:
The New York Times
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| May 28, 2003 | - The Pentagon discovered 200 vials of anthrax and other bacteria among 2,000 tons of hazardous waste on an Army base about 50 miles from Washington, D.C.
| Source:
Times of London
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| March 18, 2003 | -
American officials were alarmed over an Iraqi drone aircraft that they claimed could be used to deliver anthrax, and they complained that Hans Blix had downplayed the drone in a recent report.
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| August 27, 2002 | -
A former U.S. Army scientist publicly identified as a “person of interest” in the FBI's anthrax investigation filed ethics complaints against Attorney General John Ashcroft and others, claiming they violated Justice Department regulations by leaking inflammatory information about him.
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| July 2, 2002 | -
Federal officers searched the home of a biologist in Maryland as part of the ongoing investigation into last year's anthrax attacks but said they had found no evidence of wrongdoing.
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| April 9, 2002 | -
Russia's Mosenergo utility company was threatening to cut off power to a bioweapons laboratory complex near Moscow that houses a repository of anthrax, plague, and 3,000 other strains of bacteria.
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| March 5, 2002 | -
The Texas veterinarian who first isolated the Ames strain of anthrax was fighting $9,000 in fines for burning the carcasses of anthrax-infected cattle, in violation of Texas air pollution rules.
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| March 5, 2002 | -
At the time of the offense, Texas preferred that the anthrax be buried in a landfill, leaving open the possibility that the bacteria could be harvested by terrorists.
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| March 5, 2002 | -
The F.B.I. claimed to have a “short list” of suspects in last year's anthrax attacks.
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| January 15, 2002 | -
It was revealed that the United States government was selling old declassified reports to the general public with titles such as “The Stability of Botulinum Toxin in Common Beverages” and “Development of 'N' for Offensive Use in Biological Warfare.” Botulinum is the most poisonous substance known; “N” was the military code word for anthrax. The reports go for about $15.
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| December 25, 2001 | -
Bush Administration officials told reporters that they tried as hard as they could to blame Iraq for the recent anthrax attacks but the evidence kept pointing back to America.
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| December 18, 2001 | - The White House announced that the anthrax used in recent mail attacks probably originated in the United States; Army officials confirmed that the bacteria was a genetic match with anthrax in the Army's stockpile but pointed out that their supply had come from the Agriculture Department.
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| December 11, 2001 | - Clayton Lee Waagner, who was arrested for mailing hundreds of anthrax hoax letters to abortion clinics, said he had nothing against John Ashcroft: “I understand he's anti-abortion also. He's a good man.”
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| November 20, 2001 | - Postal Service investigators found another anthrax letter.
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| November 20, 2001 | - BioPort, the sole company approved by the government to make the anthrax vaccine, admitted that it still wasn't able to pass inspection and begin producing the vaccine.
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| November 13, 2001 | -
Osama bin Laden told a Pakistani newspaper that he didn't know anything about the anthrax
attacks in the United States.
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| November 13, 2001 | - Federal agents, who now believe the anthrax to be the work of a lone domestic terrorist, still have not gotten around to locating all the labs in the United States where the bacteria can be legally handled, though they were busy cracking down on medical
marijuana in California and assisted suicide in Oregon.
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| November 6, 2001 | - Robert S. Mueller III, director of the FBI, admitted that he had no idea who was sending anthrax through the mail and appealed to ordinary Americans to help figure it out: “If you know somebody is doing different things with anthrax than they should be and it's somewhat suspicious, we're asking you to let us know.” Consensus was beginning to form that the anthrax was not only the same strain used in American bioweapons programs (the “Ames strain”) but that the spores were prepared using the top-secret American “weaponization” recipe.
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| November 6, 2001 | - Arapahoe County, Colorado, officials were planning to prosecute a 10-year-old boy for putting white powder in a film canister so he could be a hero for finding anthrax at his school.
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| October 30, 2001 | - Postal workers continued to come down with anthrax.
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| October 30, 2001 | - Secretary of Health Tommy Thompson was criticized for mishandling the anthrax
attack and substituting spin control for effective public-health strategies. Campbell Gardett, a spokesman for the agency, defended his boss: “Something that's factual at this moment proves not to be factual in retrospect. That doesn't mean it wasn't factual at the time.”
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| October 30, 2001 | -
President Bush warned that America was “still under attack.” Experts described the anthrax as “fluffy.” The terrorists “have the keys to the kingdom,” warned Al Zelicoff, a doctor who works on biological weapons. “They can do large-scale dissemination when they wish.” In a press release entitled “Pentagon Seeks Ideas on Combating Terrorism,” the United States Department of Defense announced that it “specifically seeks help in combating terrorism, defeating difficult targets, conducting protracted operations in remote areas, and developing countermeasures to weapons of mass destruction.”
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| October 30, 2001 | - The United States agreed to clean up Vozrozhdeniye (“Renaissance”) Island in Uzbekistan, where the Soviets dumped tons of anthrax spores in 1988.
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| October 23, 2001 | - The president flew to
Shanghai, China, for the Asia Pacific
Economic Cooperation summit.
He rode around in a limo and pronounced the city “mind-boggling” and “miraculous.” He wore a traditional Chinese silk jacket; it was blue with gold trim.
He noted that “there is no isolation from evil.” At a joint press conference with President Jiang Zemin, President Bush answered questions about anthrax.
“These are evil people and the deeds that have been conducted on the American people are evil deeds,” he said.
“And anybody who would mail anthrax letters, trying to affect the lives of innocent people, is evil.” The president also cautioned that the anthrax attacks could turn out to be “a hoax.” Preliminary analysis of the anthrax found in New York and Florida showed that the bacteria was “professional grade” and all from the same strain.
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| October 23, 2001 | - It was revealed that in 1944 Britain manufactured 5 million anthrax
cattle cakes that were to be airdropped (in “Operation Vegetarian”) over Germany; the expectation was that the disease would kill all the cattle and then kill all the Germans.
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| October 16, 2001 | - Tom Brokaw's assistant at NBC Nightly News tested positive for cutaneous anthrax; another case turned up at a Microsoft office in Reno, Nevada.
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| October 16, 2001 | - Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been hiding out in an undisclosed location, observed that there might be a connection between the anthrax cases and the September 11
attacks.
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| October 16, 2001 | -
Anthrax, the heavy metal band, decided not to change its name even though it was making the band members feel bad.
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| October 9, 2001 | -
Anthrax killed a man in Florida; spores were found on the man's computer keyboard and in the nose of a co-worker at American Media Inc., the publisher of supermarket tabloids.
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| October 9, 2001 | - The one laboratory in the United States that has been approved to manufacture an anthrax vaccine has been unable to do so since 1998 because it has repeatedly failed safety inspections.
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| February 13, 2001 | - A new report found that experiments with lethal biological agents such as anthrax, plague, and botulism, in national laboratories such as Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Brookhaven, lacked proper safety controls and endangered lab personnel and the general public.
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| January 30, 2001 | - Someone sent a letter filled with orange powder, which looked like anthrax, to the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, causing the evacuation of a building.
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