KO's first two segments numbers 5 and 4 are on Ivins. Number 4 is the one most commenters/lurkers will be more interested in. Here’s the link if you don’t want to watch #5. (see sig)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#25978251

P.S. For Mooser only, all you have to do is click.

You missed the point of the post. Mr.Ivin's psychological problems, or lack of them as the anonymous but credible poster tells us (Perhaps the address gave Glenn a clue to his credibility?) is not the issue.

I will insert a joke about hiring people to read for you as well as type for you as soon as I think of it.

This is a NON story.

-- bernbart

What is a "non story"? That ABC is still keeping their lying sources to themselves? The sources who ganged up with ABC to help get the American public behind invading a country and it's people who had nothing to do with the attack on us? Is that the 'non story" you're dismissing? Or was there something else you were posting about?

I couldn't agree more with the sentiments expressed, although I don't quite see how Glenn Greenwald has made or confirmed any (unattributed, so far) accusations against Bruce Ivins. As I read his writing, I think Greenwald has gone out of his way to avoid that.

Which is smart. For me, probably the stinkiest part of this latest unattributed "high government official" release, which was included in the original AP report of the story, and others, is the suggestion that as a motive, Ivins may have wanted to deploy weaponized anthrax as some experiment to test the anti-anthrax vaccinations he'd been trying to develop. And this claim was attributed in those stories evidently to the same sources that fingered Bruce Ivins as the alleged culprit in the first place.

Could someone please suggest just how this makes any sense at all? How could anonymously mailing weaponized anthrax to several congress and media people test any vaccine, which none of them had ever been administered so far as we know?

And since it makes no sense, then how did the strange claim make it into the news stories?

My impression so far is that the actual responsible parties are trying again to refabricate yet another new fictional construct to get the heat off themselves. And who might these be? The list of possible suspects at this obviously very high level isn't really very long, after all.

Edson C. Hendricks 8/1/08 19:17 PDT

San Diego, California

Nope I'm all straightened out now! When Kitt said that his browser converted the typed address to a link, it all became clear to me. My browser (Explorer) doesn't do that, but Outlook does.

I have to click your sig, not the address you typed. And long URLs "break" the format cause the system treats them as one word.

All clear now. Thanks.

Where is most classified, "national security" information - information used extensively by reporters for both (occasional) public-interest-serving stories and (frequent) partisan-interest-serving stories - located? At the federal government level. Where have "reporter shield" laws been enacted? At the state government level. What difference does an Executive Branch filled with classified (and thus not easily rebutted) information make in the Congressional debate about a proposed federal shield law?

Is Judith Miller's jail time for contempt of court in the Plame leak investigation a reason to further privilege her profession? Are the anonymous federal-level leaks to reporters about federal employee Steven Hatfill in the anthrax investigation a justification for the granting of such a powerful privilege to certain (mostly stockholder-serving) members of what passes today for a free press? Does ABC's irresponsible conduct in its anthrax-investigation reporting militate for more protection for its anonymous sources?

Here's what key members of the United States Senate think, from the Congressional Record:

Patrick Leahy, 7/29/08:

Years ago, my mother and father owned a small daily newspaper in Waterbury, VT, the Waterbury Record. As a child, I grew up hearing, at the kitchen table, that a free and vibrant press is essential to a free society. That has been demonstrated again and again over the last eight years. That is why I cosponsored the Senate version of this bill and I have worked hard to enact a meaningful reporters' shield law this year.

-snip-

Earlier this year, Toni Locy, a professor of journalism at West Virginia University, also a former USA TODAY reporter, was held in contempt of court for refusing to divulge her confidential sources [in her Hatfill/anthrax reporting, a case which has now been settled by the federal government for more than $5 million].

-snip-

I thank and commend the more than 60 news media and journalism organizations including ABC News, the Associated Press, CNN, -snip- that worked so hard to get us to this point.

Arlen Specter, 7/29/08:

The chilling effect has been overwhelming, in part because of the issuance of subpoenas and contempt citations. For example, the case of Judith Miller of the New York Times has received extensive publicity. She was jailed for around 85 days for failing to disclose the source of information she had in the case involving the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. It has always been a mystery to me why Judith Miller was held in contempt, when it was known that Deputy Secretary of State Armitage was the source of the information. But a special prosecutor subpoenaed numerous witnesses and conducted a very high profile publicity investigation. Ultimately, Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail under very unpleasant circumstances. I can personally attest to the conditions because Michael O'Neal, my chief counsel when I chaired the Judiciary Committee, and I visited her in the Virginia prison where she was detained.

John Cornyn, 7/30/08:

I remember when William Safire, the distinguished journalist, testified before the Judiciary Committee and someone asked him about bloggers. He said he considers them the new pamphleteers, modern-day pamphleteers. In other words, they could be writing things just as importantly as Thomas Payne might have written at the time of the country's founding, and yet the legislation the Senator from New York talked about would do nothing to provide them the benefits of a media shield, and there would be--in effect, Congress would be deciding who is a legitimate journalist and who is not. I, for one, am not comfortable with the Federal Government in essence licensing journalists and ignoring the new media, which is the source of a lot of information, and treating them in a discriminatory manner.

http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2008_record&page=S7711&position=all

Dick Durbin, 7/30/08:

Since 2000, four journalists--Judith Miller, Jim Taricani, Josh Wolf and Vanessa Leggett--have been imprisoned for 19 months in total for refusing to disclose their confidential sources.

-snip-

The media shield bill would address this problem by creating a Federal qualified privilege for communications between confidential sources and reporters.

Chris Dodd, 7/30/08:

But today, we find this cornerstone of self-governance facing a new threat--one that comes not from the dictates of a dangerous government, but for the best of intentions.

.

As we have heard time and again in recent years, in a spate of cases, prosecutors have used subpoenas, fines, and jail time to compel journalists to reveal their anonymous sources.

Judith Miller of the New York Times was famously jailed for 85 days for refusing to reveal a source.

-snip-

It only takes a few cases like Ms. Miller's and the San Francisco Chronicle's before the news begins censoring itself.

Watch the corporate powers-that-be buy themselves more power, to a chorus of "bipartisan" Congressional enthusiasm.

Hatfill attorney Mark Grannis, 3/15/08:

The public officials who leaked investigative information to Ms. Locy broke the law, ruined an innocent man, and violated the public trust. Shouldn't our watchdog bark or something?

-snip-

The fact that they shut their mouths tight and run the other way suggests that the image of reporter-as-watchdog does not reflect the current place of journalism in society, whatever may have been true in the past.

Third, if the law prevents courts from ordering reporters to identify anonymous sources, what will prevent government officials from using the private information they keep on us for personal or political score-settling? What will prevent them from simply lying? What will prevent reporters from inventing anonymous sources who don't actually exist?

http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120553984106238259.html

Little Brother precisely described - in another context - the shallow, self-serving thinking of Congressional incumbents:

But with few exceptions, our political elite has forsaken the formerly-settled notion that office-holders have a higher duty to the Constitution that at least occasionally requires them to leave quotidian business-as-usual, and undertake politically inconvenient and risky duties to redress profound wrongdoing that undermines our constitutional republic. -snip- Everything is reduced to political calculus, and there's no more room for the notion that it is even possible to act responsibly without regard to such political calculus.