
You have to give Nicholas Kristof his due, the man is not totally incapable of feeling. After using the New York Times for his personal vigilante crusade to take down the men who instigated the anthrax attacks in 2002, Kristof has been feeling guilt pangs for perhaps being over-zealous with his information to the FBI.
This is relevant now because the man that Kristof originally fingered as the culprit, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, was exonerated while the purported real criminal, Bruce Ivins, recently committed suicide before he was able to be tried. And Nicholas bucks it up like a true gentleman and issues a public retraction and apology to Hatfill, albeit eight years after the fact.
But Nick isn't content to let the matter drop, and wants the American public to walk a mile in his shoes with these fun hypothetical scenarios. What would you do if you were presented with questionable information of the "maybe wrong" variety but realized you were perhaps sitting on a big story? CONTINUED »
Government scientist Bruce Ivins killed himself last week, amidst reports federal officials were going to arrest him as a suspect in the anthrax-in-envelopes scares following 9/11. Ivins, who worked with scary molecules like Cholera before turning his attention to anthrax full time, basically went off the deep end as he was closed in on, and even his shrink was scared of him. With Ivins' death, though, comes new questions about Sept. 11's aftermath and the anthrax scare — namely, how ABC News might have contributed to government-planted misinformation about the situation. What type of misinformation? Say, for instance, that Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program was behind the anthrax scare. You remember Mr. Hussein, don't you? He's the late former Iraqi leader who was so evil the United States spent billions of dollars on a casualty-laden war, all based on various pieces of wrong information, like non-existent WMDs and now, perhaps, a non-existent link between Hussein and the anthrax. CONTINUED »