How long did Duley wait between Ivins' alleged confession and her restraining order? Why did she, as a mental health worker, knowing her patient is insane and making death threats, not have him committed? After all, having him committed works a hell of a lot better than a restraining order for a guy who just bought a gun and a bullet-proof vest to go out in a blaze of glory.

Her story doesn't make any sense. There should be a roomful of witnesses who heard Ivins' rant at his group therapy session, and yet the media, which keeps finding all sorts of unnamed sources, can't find one witness to confirm Duley's story.

So:

Why is Duley NOW afraid and in hiding AFTER the psychotic maniac multiple murderer is dead and gone?

Let me speculate. Duley is not afraid of Ivins. He is dead. She is afraid of whoever told her that Ivins was about to be indicted for five murders. She knows that her story stinks, and if the story unravels it will be the FBI that is exposed, that this would tie the FBI to Ivins' death, to a coverup of the real killer(s) and the false flag operation that pushed us to war. And she knows the FBI knows it. For the purpose of a coverup she is pretty much worthless now. All she can do is avoid the press now and hope that the story disappears before she's caught in more lies.

It started out brilliantly, but Zod has managed to drag it ever downward. This forum software needs a block feature. He's a complete waste of time.

Glenn, by his own admission General Zod has been on the piss all night. He waded in critiquing others' contributions while admitting he hadn't bothered reading the whole thread. I wouldn't waste too much time in him!

Maybe you need some more levity? Still from that lovely Guardian story:

Perhaps we should count our blessings that they haven't yet reinvented the ducking stool and left its modern variant to [the] CIA.

In the case of Florida professor Sami al-Arian. Despite being acquitted by a jury and entering a plea bargain to be deported to escape the harassment, the FBI now has Arian in prison for contempt charges for refusing to appear as a witness in an entirely unrelated case. Typically, the US justice department has spent $50m on this case. With the happy exception of Hatfill, one sure consequence of their persecution is that their victims have to bankrupt themselves paying lawyers to defend against the charges. Their persecutors just send their bills to the taxpayers. No wonder that suicide seemed a reasonable way out to Ivins, even if he were innocent.

Certainly the pattern is so pronounced that I would seriously consider signing a petition to re-examine Al Capone's case.

FYI... pieceofcake is (usually) a satirist of a different order... commenting upon a thread as if delivering some literary criticism. Not meant to be taken at face value.

Anyone else note the irony that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn passed away in the last couple of days? THE CANCER WARD.

If the FBI had a good case, we wouldn't see all these leaks that are utterly irrelevant to establishing Ivins' guilt. If the public swallows all this and subsequently the FBI's circumstantial-only evidence, then there will be no pressure to force ABC to reveal its sources.

Even with public opinion firmly against the FBI, the chances of anything happening are minimal. But unless we poke all the holes possible into the government story, there is zero chance of getting anywhere.

i also like the ABC angle much much better then the guessing game who is the bigger psycho - Duley or Ivens ot none of the above - but just wait Glenn will get it himself it just takes a little time.

"You can stick with whatever you want. Respectfully, I find it amazing -- and pretty repugnant -- that so many people are eager to refrain from questioning the Government's claims about who the anthrax attacker is." (Glenn)

I agree. Seems many want to believe their government's explanation on almost anything -- even after 7.5 years of Bush, a man who seemingly would rather lie even if the truth would serve him better.

Why? Are we infested with Republicans posing as liberal/progressive/Democrat/libertarian/whatever?

In a Democracy, if the people really run the government, the people need to know in a transparent manner everything the government does. The people need the truth, or they are the ruled, not the ruler.

Most readers of this thread know Spertzel's antecedents. It would be impossible to make any collection of information here if we had to keep prefacing it with every bit of information already gathered.

(1) Is it really possible that the common wet spores used commonly at Ft. Detrick could be converted into the high-grade, extremely dangerous anthrax sent to Daschle by doing nothing more than getting a lyopholizer and drying it?

Based on the issues I discussed in my post at Achieving Our Country yesterday (linked at my sig) and especially on the discussion by Ed Lake that I linked to, I'm starting to believe that spores that are simply really "clean", where all vegetative cells have been disrupted and removed could then be dried by almost any method and have the properties that have been discussed. I think that is because it is a property of the surface chemistry of the spores themselves and when everything else is removed then that chemistry dominates the material. I don't want to make this a "how to", so suffice it to say that I think the final step could be as simple as just collecting the spores with a common filtration device and then allowing them to dry naturally, either in air or in a small vacuum desiccator. A lyophilizer would speed up this step, but I worry about loss of material since most lyophilizers rotate the flask where the material is drying and then I think spores would start aerosolizing and get sucked out of the system by the vacuum pump. Note that the very good catch of Ivins using a lyophilizer in previous published work noted upthread pertains to lyophilizing the protein antigen used as the vaccine--not spores. One argument in favor of a lyophilizer over a spray dryer is that standard lyophilizers are convenient for the amounts of material known to have been used in the attacks. The spray dryers I'm familiar with are much larger and would require much more material, but I suppose smaller ones must be around, especially for process development research.

(2) What do you make of this - from the NYT:

"Further, the attack strain contained bacteria with both the flipped and the unflipped DNA, showing that it was a mixture of two strains, which analysts later found reflected a mix of origins — 85 percent from the Dugway Proving Ground of the Army in Utah and 15 percent added at Fort Detrick, according to one person close to the investigation."

Okay, I'm busted here because one of my previous duties in industry related to the genetics of starter cultures for biopesticides. What seems to be going on here, from piecing together various "leaks", is that the attack material and a "flask" of anthrax under Ivins' control have the 85:15 mix of the Dugway and Fort Detrick DNA signatures. As mentioned in the reports, at least 10 people had access to this "flask".

Using that material as the starter for a new culture would give the same profile as long as at least several thousand cells were used to start the new culture. What would change the profile would be if the person wanting to start the new culture took the intervening common step of growing cells on an agar plate, where the starter material is "spread" on the plate in such a way that the individual colonies on the plate are derived from single cells. In that case, new cultures using individual colonies from the plate would have a pure composition of either the Fort Detrick or Dugway profile, and if many were started in parallel, then 85% would have the Dugway profile and 15% would have the Fort Detrick profile. Someone in a hurry and "stealing" a bit of the Ivins culture wouldn't necessarily take that intervening step of plating before starting the new culture.