When an Anti-Islam False Flag Shut Down the US Capitol

By Kevin Barrett, for the forthcoming Crescent International, posted in full for my paid Substack subscribers only

The US government and mainstream media are obsessed with January 6, 2021. On that day, roughly 2000 people, out of the tens of thousands who had rallied near the White House to protest what they saw as a stolen election, entered the capitol building in Washington, DC. That protest, which featured a smattering of violence and extreme rhetoric, has been memorialized as the insurrection. More than 1000 people have been charged and over 400 have served, or are still serving, prison sentences.

Everyone has heard of January 6, 2021. The imperial propaganda apparatus has made sure of that. But few remember October 18, 2001. That was the date of a much more important attack on Congress: the anthrax mailings that shut down America’s legislative branch for five days. (The danger wasn’t just theoretical: More than 30 Congressional staff members tested positive for anthrax exposure.)

The January 6 protestors, however misguided, believed they were defending constitutional democracy. Their brief incursion into the Capitol, which most did not realize was illegal, merely shut down Congress for a few hours.

The anthrax attack, by contrast, was part of a carefully orchestrated insider attack on constitutional democracy (and on Muslims and Islam). Not only did it take Congress out of commission for a whole week, but it also ensured that when the senators and representatives reconvened, they were terrorized into passing the so-called Patriot Act, which rolled back the US Constitution in service to the so-called war on terror, in reality a thinly-disguised war on Islam.

The best book on subject is The 2001 Anthrax Deception by the late Dr. Graeme MacQueen.

Dr. MacQueen, who passed away April 25, was a Religious Studies professor at McMaster University, a practicing Buddhist, and a Peace Studies pioneer. His book develops the thesis that neoconservative insiders orchestrated the September 11 and anthrax attacks as part of the same operation. Their goal: sideline Congress, bestow emergency powers on the executive branch, and stampede the US into a series of wars on the Muslim East.

When I interviewed Graeme MacQueen shortly after The 2001 Anthrax Deception was published in 2014, he repeatedly expressed amazement at the magnitude of the deception, the shameless brazenness of the perpetrators, and the failure of mainstream media to investigate and report the facts:

“And again, as I looked into it, I knew that in general, the anthrax attacks had been supposedly used to pass the Patriot Act. But it wasn't until I forced myself to sit down and look at it in detail that I saw how astonishing it all was. Members of Congress were warned not to identify themselves as members of Congress. They might get killed, couldn't wear their little congressional pin, were supposed to not use their special license plates. So they're all in hiding. They flee town. The House of Representatives was...deceived and intimidated during that period, just when the Patriot Act was coming before them. And the FBI issued its biggest warning since 9/11 on the very day that the Senate was going to be considering the Patriot Act. And that evening, late in that evening, they passed it.”

The FBI terror warning on October 26, 2001 (the date the Patriot Act finally passed) hyped an allegedly urgent threat to government buildings and other public spaces. It was the culmination of a three-week process of terrorizing Congress that followed the refusal of senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy to meet Dick Cheney’s October 5^th deadline for passing the Patriot Act. Daschle’s first letter, which contained ultra-weaponized US military anthrax, was mailed between October 6 and 9 and opened on October 15—the same day the Congressional newspaper Roll Call published a screaming headline “(Capitol) Hill Braces for Anthrax Threat.” Then on October 18, the legislative branch of the US government was suspended and forced into hiding. When it reconvened the following week, the quick passage of the Patriot Act was a foregone conclusion.

The anthrax letters were not just an attack on the US Congress, but also a false flag attack on Islam and Muslims. The letters to Daschle and Leahy included the scrawled message: “Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” Today, the US government admits that Muslims had nothing to do with the anthrax letters. So the anthrax affair, unlike other aspects of the fall 2001 attack on America, is an officially-admitted false flag.

But who did it? The FBI was apparently ordered to frame a bioweapons scientist named Bruce Ivins, who was conveniently suicided. But Graeme MacQueen’s The 2001 Anthrax Deception argues that the real perpetrators were the same neoconservatives who orchestrated the explosive destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon. All of the September-October 2001 attacks, according to MacQueen, appear to have been part of a single operation. He cites evidence that the neocons’ original plan was to blame the September-October attacks on Al-Qaeda and its alleged state sponsor, Iraq. Throughout the fall of 2001 the neocon propaganda machine churned out a series of false reports positing a close connection between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. (In reality, Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were enemies.)

In service to the “blame Iraq-plus-Al-Qaeda” plan, it seems that some of the 9/11 patsies—Western-intelligence-manipulated dupes who would be falsely blamed as suicide hijackers—were sheep-dippedⁱ in anthrax during the summer of 2001. Neocon-instigated stories appeared on October claiming that one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers had been treated for apparent anthrax exposure. As MacQueen said in our interview: “In October 2001, these connections were being gradually revealed to the newspapers: ‘Oh, look, the hijackers who did 9/11 lived in these particular locations, which were also centers of the anthrax attacks. And oh, look at this interesting connection: The same real estate agent was a real estate agent for two of the 9/11 hijackers, and at the same time, for the first person to die from anthrax, Robert Stephens.’”

When it became clear that the anthrax had come from a US military lab, not from Iraq or Al-Qaeda, all of the planted evidence linking the 9/11 and anthrax attacks suddenly became a huge embarrassment. As Dr. MacQueen explained on my radio show: “The FBI has spent years now burying those connections because, of course, what once looked like a good idea — ‘Let's show people they were connected’ — became a very bad idea as soon as the anthrax operation fell apart. As soon as it became clear it was a domestic operation, they had to make it clear it had nothing to do with 9/11. ‘9/11 was real extremist Muslims killing Americans. The anthrax attacks were fake extremist Muslims killing Americans. Keep that straight! Nothing to see here, folks. Just please keep walking.’”

America is still walking blind. In 2001 Congress was shut down, the Constitution was rolled back, and America declared war on Islam and Muslims, killing millions of people and wasting trillions of dollars on pointless wars whose only conceivable beneficiary was Zionist Israel. Yet today, media propaganda erases, ignores, and inverts the truth, while painting the misguided, ineffectual January 6 protestors as a monumental threat to constitutional democracy. It seems that the oligarch owners of the American Deep State will do everything in their power to ensure that Americans not understand that the real democracy-ending attack on Congress happened not on January 6, 2021, but on October 18, 2001.

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*Sheep-dipping is an intelligence term for creating a false history for an intelligence asset.