I personally think the whole case against Ivins turns on his opportunity to mail the letters and on their postmarked date. If it turns out that it was impossible for him to mail them, then he had nothing to do with the crime or, horrors!, it was a conspiracy. That he had help. Surely lone nuts never do. This pivotal fact of being able to mail or not to mail is so important that the FBI will back-pedal to the news orgs in order to back-fill when there are contradictions making the original suppositions about Ivins's whereabouts false. But what WAS he doing on the day the letters were mailed? Surely there is some evidence of where he was and where he therefore could not be. The silence is deafening after the original story.

That said, the points made about how skepticism about the government's official story is treated as harebrained conspiracy theory are right on.

I might go further. Saddam as anthrax-sender was something originally promoted by which agencies? Surely NOT the FBI. Was it the Pentagon? Remember the stories (made up out of whole cloth) that one of the " 9/11 hijackers" had cutaneous anthrax? What ever happened to that? Remember the crop-duster stories and the linkage with the death of the Florida photographer?

Not only were the victims meaningful to the story, so were the original falsehoods about perps, and the callous unconcern with which they were proferred to a terrified public, as though someone knew there was no vital security matter at stake. As though a lie did not endanger the public, but merely reinforced the case for war with someone we now know was not to blame. How much was bin Laden to blame for 9/11, I wonder. You have to wonder, don't you? Even if it is considered holy writ that even if Saddam didn't do the anthrax or participate in 9/11, bin Laden did. But isn't it a maxim of the law that once you impeach a liar on the stand, his credibility is shot for all time? We know about some lies, but do we know about all the lies?

In a way, the FBI comes off a little better than some other agencies here, because at least they early on identified the killer as domestic. That must have really annoyed the administration.

Oh yes, and one more thing. How quickly the anthrax plot unfolded after 9/11. I thought that lone nuts acted on their own time, especially with something as sensitive as this. And the way it all fit with the legislation following 9/11. Remarkable. As though someone knew what was coming.

Quite frankly, you are off-base if you think that I am some sort of disinfo specialist. Nor am I a cargo-cultist who takes what falls from helicopters as some gift of the gods (as did the New Guinea natives whose impressions of the US military in WWII gave rise to their superstition that they were the gods). I feel that every bit of leak and official release of our government is suspect, but I also do not think that the government always acts monolithically. I think that if it did, the official story that Saddam and Atta and bin Laden were working together (however implausible) would be holy writ and that everything would be built on that. We aren't all one religion here, and neither is our government.

The administration is not the FBI or vice versa, though things like the USA Patriot Act and Homeland Security would like more of that centralized control over the messages that get out. Somehow, the truth has a way of rearing its head, even in the Whack-a-Mole orbits of the Beltway. While it is true that you cannot always assume that there is bad blood between agencies (Good Cop/ Bad Cop being so integral to their games), it is also the case that the anthrax, in particular, was supposed to be fathered off onto someone who could be used to promote the new product, the GWOT, and it looks like FBI wasn't cooperating.

If it was, that would mean that it was holding in abeyance the conclusion that the anthrax was domestic for when the troops in Iraq could not succeed in finding any labs which might have been able to produce it. Just as an aside, though, do you remember when the story went out that other countries were being victimized by anthrax mailings? I seem to recall several European countries allegedly got contaminated mail. That story died pretty fast. Wonder how and why it did. But here too, recall that not every country skips to the same beat as the Bush administration, even if they members of the G-8.

As for my remark about Ivins -- I only sought to eliminate him once and for all as a suspect, but reserved judgment on whether that could be done if some possible confederate could be added (and perhaps renditioned and tortured of course, to get the "full monty").

Even if you cast your net as wide as cargocult and see in all of this corporate machinations (that's not conspiracy theory?), nevertheless (I took two years of college chemistry so I know about things being possible or impossible physically) you must be able to get a firm yes or no on a suspect. Unfortunately, Mr. Ivins is dead and apparently his suicide might even help his family to get money. I like what George Washington said at his blog, about the FBI's history of bribing family members to get them to testify against their own (Ivins's son's price was going to be $2.5 million; his trash-talking brother - who I think wanted to compare him to Unabomber -- how much did he get?)

Anyway, I signed on for the defense of a dead man. If that is trolling, it is a pretty odd kind. I am a citizen of a Republic, and I smell not trolls but rats aplenty.