Strange Days

Here's a story from Salon that is sure to keep conspiracy theory freaks going for years:

On Sept. 24, 2005, tens of thousands of protesters marched past the White House and flooded the National Mall near 17th Street and Constitution Avenue. They had arrived from all over the country for a day of speeches and concerts to protest the war in Iraq. It may have been the biggest antiwar rally since Vietnam. A light rain fell early in the day and most of the afternoon was cool and overcast.

Unknown to the crowd, biological-weapons sensors, scattered for miles across Washington by the Department of Homeland Security, were quietly doing their work. The machines are designed to detect killer pathogens. Sometime between 10 a.m. on Sept. 24 and 10 a.m. on Sept. 25, six of those machines sucked in trace amounts of deadly bacteria called Francisella tularensis. The government fears it is one of six biological weapons most likely to be used against the United States.

It was an alarming reading. The biological-weapons detection system in Washington had never set off any alarms before. There are more than 150 sensors spread across 30 of the most populated cities in America. But this was the first time that six sensors in any one place had detected a toxin at the same time. The sensors are also located miles from one another, suggesting that the pathogen was airborne and probably not limited to a local environmental source.

There is much debate over whether or not this was a botched terrorist attack or if the bacteria, which can be found naturally in the soil, was kicked up in the air by all the marchers. Another troubling aspect of this story is that it took Homeland Security five days to analyze and test the readings, and then alert state and local public health officials across the country.

So far, there have been no confirmed reports of any marchers becoming ill from exposure to this bacteria, which causes flu-like symptoms and is easily treatable with antibiotics (if properly diagnosed). However, Salon does quote several anti-war marchers who claimed that they experienced flu-like symptoms after the demonstration...

Bizarre coincidence? A Pentagon test on an undesirable segment of the population? A home-grown, right-wing attack on liberals and freaks? I really wanna know.

Also, why hasn't there been more coverage of this story in the press? (I did a Google search and only found a few stories in the Guardian Unlimited, Reuters, and the Bangor Daily News among others.)