FBI Overlooks Foreign Sources of Anthrax

Opinion Journal ^ | 12/24/2001 | EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN

[aristeides]

Article doesn't mention Iraq. But we can put two and two together.

[Nogbad]

ping

[Nogbad]

ping

[The Raven]

>>The Bushies have their own good buddies lined up for that.

What do you have against Bush? Why the mindless comment?

[The Raven]

A big bad corporation that makes vaccine - distributing the bugs to make money. Sounds like a liberalized James Bond movie. Too much Greenpeace fairy tail implications. BUT - the guy in charge is a Muslim????

[Shermy]

Bump.

[Allan]

It is interesting to see the comments that have been removed from this thread
much as biographical items were removed from the Soviet Encyclopedia
from time to time
as well as faces
from the official photographs of the Central Committee.

[Mitchell]

Faces? What faces? They were never there.

Seriously, at least the thread itself is still here. Beyond the question of bannings of individuals, I don't understand why entire threads are sometimes removed just because the thread happened to have been posted originally by someone who has since been banned or who has decided to "retire" his screen name.

The news article posted is generally just a normal news article that ought to be archived (I'm not talking about trolls); other people's posts on the thread are just normal comments and discussion that would be interesting to save. But, at times, the entire thread gets removed, lock, stock, and barrel.

Even within the context of Jim Robinson protecting his conservative bastion (which one can understand, whether one agrees with it or not), it's hard to see any rationale for this "guilt by association".

[Shermy]

I understand your comments but I think in the context of the anthrax threads there's a variety of reasons.

Some have asked to be self-deleted, or self nuked, including all posts - like pokerbuddy0 and badabing badaboom - though this thread predates them at FR. (unfortunately the threads they themselves posted were also deleted).

There's one or two, for example TGS, that beyond being banned from future posting their prior posts were nuked because of intimations of libel suits and complaints about nasty attitudes. (Think also Jameson and Don Foster). I think the FR monitors in those case just hit the "delete" button to get rid of the problem totally.

I have not witnessed any deletions on anthrax threads relating to political aspects or "trolls."

[Mitchell]

Badabing Badaboom was very quick to be the first to post anthrax articles for quite some time. Just because he retired his screen name is no reason to remove all those articles from the archives. His comments should have been removed at his request, but the articles he posted were just newspaper articles and there was no reason to delete them.

The end effect is that FR is no longer the excellent archive of anthrax articles that it once was.

[Mitchell]

Let me be clearer on the point:

Because of Badabing Badaboom's speed and completeness in finding anthrax articles and posting them, he happened to have started many of the anthrax threads. As a result, a significant portion of the history of the anthrax mailings disappeared from the FR archives when BB withdrew, since the newspaper articles he happened to post were also inexplicably deleted.

FR has the potential to be a wonderful, nearly complete, historical archive of the news. It's a shame that it's not quite working out that way.

[Allan]

Furthermore
even for the non-deleted threads
the removal of comments renders the replies incomprehensible
so usually the dialogue becomes totally meaningless
and the thread worthless.