I've long been rather puzzled by the country's collective amnesia about the anthrax attacks. For a time they seemed to loom larger in the public's mind than the recent 9/11 attacks. This made perfect sense, as it was an ongoing potential threat to life and health. It was more terrorism, with a yet-unknown scope of destruction and a still-unknown perpetrator. Then we just sorta forgot.
But it was also the first major salvo in the Iraq war propaganda blitz, as major media outlets jumped to link it to bad old Saddam (and American pundits often blather about "conspiracy theories" on the "Arab street.") Bentonite, known to most of us as "clumping kitty litter," was a uniquely Iraqi thing, or something.
Anyway, Glenn Greenwald takes long hard look at trusted news source ABC, and its role in peddling that crap. The failure to revisit these stories or to explain how they came to be really highlights the fact that something is seriously wrong with our very trustworthy outlets.
