Gwen Shuni D’Arcangelis - Bio-Imperialism

Not more than a month after the events of September 11, 2001, letters laced with deadly anthrax spores arrived at the offices of several news media outlets and two U.S. senators, causing five deaths and seventeen injuries. The anthrax attacks swiftly shifted into position as a central node of the burgeoning war on terror, elevating its focus on bioterrorism, that is, the intentional spread of disease via germ or biological weapons. The FBI launched a massive, broad-scale investigation to find the perpetrator, enlisting advisers from science, national security, and policy and scholarly bodies, and even investigative journalists.

Early speculation reflected dominant national security discourse: the perpetrator was thought to be Al Qaeda or Iraqthe usual suspects of the post-9 / 11 eraor possibly Russia, a remnant of earlier Cold War era antagonism. Former vice president Dick Cheney conjectured that Al Qaeda actually used to train people in how to deploy and use these kinds of substances [biological and chemical weapons] (The Anthrax Source 2001). Weapons inspector Dick Spertzel was quoted in a Wall Street Journalarticle, The Anthrax War, suggesting that there are people in Iraq who know how to do it ( Wall Street Journal2001b). There was little evidence for these theories.

It took the FBI only a few months to determine that the anthrax used was the potent Ames strain, which derived from a U.S. government biodefense lab (USAMRIID).

The investigations findings were consistent with bioterrorisms historical pattern in the United States as a phenomenon carried out almost exclusively by domestic sources, specifically, white men. The lack of scrutiny of white male violence was consonant with dominant ideas about white masculinity as sources of authority and protection, ideas particularly entrenched during the war on terror (Shepherd 2006).