The local law enforcement in this story confounds me. What interest do they really have in carrying out these ill-advised raids? You'd think on a local level, a commander or incident commander would simply say "I'm not risking my men for this nonsense." You're trained to think about these things first so that you don't take your group out unnecessarily. Anytime a SWAT team goes out with live automatic weapons, your team members are in a risky situation, even if it's only with regard to an accidental shooting among the group. Which is why you don't deploy over nothing. Which is what they did, knowingly.

Great reporting on an important story. Thanks.

That is not to say that those athletes, the Chinese gymnasts, were or are anything less than world class in competition or sportsmanship.

Well, no.

If a gymnast is underage, she knows she's underage. And if she knows she's underage, she knows she's contravening the rules. Which makes her considerably less than world class in sportsmanship.

An athlete is not absolved of responsibility because his/her federation has decided to contravene the rules on his/her behalf. If your federation gives you drugs or lets you compete knowing you've tested positive or are taking drugs, that does not mean it's ok to take drugs. That positive test at the Olympics is still your fault, even if you claimed not to know what you were taking.

And just like those Bulgarian weightlifters know what they're taking and why, these underage gymnasts know how old they are.

There is considerable official documentation on He Kexin's age that make the case that she's underage. There is one document -- a recently-issued passport -- that has her 'Olympic' age on it. The IOC has passed the verification off to the federation, the federation says it's just checking passports. We have a word for this: corruption.

What it really mocks is athletes who followed the rules. In this case, it would be young gymnasts who were too young in 2004, did not allow their ages to be fudged and trained hard until this Olympics. Which, in this case, would be Nastia Liukin.

Thirty-three is mature for any Olympic athlete. Sports are generally the purview of the young and unbroken.

Hmmm.

I saw a grey-haired guy on the rings tonight, he was 35 or so. Other competitors, like that Spanish guy, are in their late 20s.

There was that 38 year-old woman who won the marathon, her runner-up was 36.

The US sailing team has some over 40s and a guy who lists his age as 58.

The Canadian showjumping team took home the silver today. Average age = 51. Oldest 61, youngest 40. (Say what you want about equestrian pursuits as sports but I promise you no one stays 'unbroken' riding large animals over huge fences and I assure you it requires a lifetime's worth of both strength and skill.)

My point is, the age thing is changing in all sports, especially where the athlete has the opportunity to make a career of the sport. The women's gymnastics system -- unlike the men's -- is set up to train girls, not adults, with burn-out as the expectation rather than the exception. If athletes can find a reason to stay in the sport, I suspect we'll see some changes in the system.

I'd like to know how the FBI planned to link Hatfill to the mailbox. I assume it was the same circumstantial stuff. How funny it is if two bioweapons experts could have been there at the same time -- who knows how many more could have made it to the mailbox that day?

I'd also like to see everything the FBI has on the Enquirer/AMI anthrax letter. Potential big can of worms with that one, especially if it can't really be linked to the Princeton mailbox. Remember that the FBI went back to Boca Raton to do a new physical investigation in 2002, just after the Hatfill theory emerged, with the FBI claiming: "This has nothing to do with Mr. Hatfill."

(see http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0208/26/bn.01.html).

I wonder what they found -- it apparently didn't implicate Hatfill and there's been nothing about the AMI incident that's been leaked to promote Ivins's guilt.

Great continued work, Glenn. (I was really looking forward to the end of your vacation.)

That's what it comes down to -- if he wasn't at the mailbox, he didn't do it and all the circumstantial noise is meaningless.

Which is why the FBI is emitting all noise, no signal and which is why it's smart to filter out the noise.

Enjoy your vacation.

The Sunday Baltimore Sun article told of FBI agents telling Ivins's boyhood neighbors in 2007 that they were conducting a fraud investigation because Ivins had faked his own death.

A Cincinnati paper interviewed someone at the town's historical society about the visits from the FBI.

About a year-and-a-half ago, FBI agents came to the Warren County Historical Society to search for information about Bruce Ivins and his family, said a volunteer with the historical society who asked not to be named.

"They were looking for anything pertaining to them," she said. "They had a report that Bruce had died. They looked through our microfilm and found his father's death notice, but not Bruce's."

(link in my sig)

The FBI were telling people they had a 'report' that Ivins died? And they were ostensibly looking for a 'report' of his death on microfilm at the Lebanon, OH Historical Society?

This is crazy stuff. Or maybe the FBI agents investigating this 'faked death' just believed what their higher-ups had told them and didn't bother to check to see if Ivins was, in fact, dead. (Not unlike the Washington Post reporters and the lyopholizer.) I wonder if anyone took the names of these agents and I wonder just how much these agents knew about the overall Ivins/anthrax 'case.'