Thanks I think. No, I am more than grateful. That is a great observation on the duplicity and simplicity of our M$M. I have to decide if I want to churn up my so far settled stomach this morning and watch it. I think you have taught us everything that is to be learned by watching. I will leave my stomach alone.

Yet another reason for why I would like to block L.W.M. (as well as General Zod) -- he has just cluttered up this conversation with another long-winded post that has nothing to do with the Greenwald article which is its anchor. It looks to me like several parties here are engaging in intentional disruption and muddying of the waters. They are trying to destroy a substantive conversation about the important issues that Greenwald raised. I wish they would move to another forum -- Free Republic would suit them well.

And that video link doesn't include either the anthrax piece that went before, or the David Gregory intro/White House pre-buttal, in which, I didn't mention, the administration gets to characterize the book as "gutter journalism" before we hear from the author. And in which we also get assaulted by a petulant Condi Rice attempting to shield the warmongers with that offensively dishonest slogan which ever goes unchalleneged; "Nobody wants war."

According to the stories I read, this therapist said Ivins showed up at a group therapy session with the gun, vest, threats, etc. A group implies that the social worker's word is not the only thing we have to rely on as to whether these claims are true. What about this group, who was there, what did they see, etc.

A lot of folks have asked about this, but the author, who has responded to many questions, keeps ignoring this one. It's getting to be the elephant in the room. I can't imagine why an answer to that obvious question is not in the story, nor in any of the author's many responses.

What gives?

Naturally, anyone who is part of group therapy may not wish for that information to become public knowledge. Not everyone wants that 15 minutes of fame in exchange for revealing more personal information than is advisable. Privacy. The rest of the group is certainly entitled to theirs, especially since they don't seem to be the ones making the case against Ivins.

See this link: http://tinyurl.com/66gs7r

Watch the tiptoeing away turn into a mad rush for the exits. The more the FBI reveals its case, the weaker, the more absurd, it looks.

In the meantime, several peculiar commenters here are preoccupied with defending the honor of Jean Duley, not in closely examining the FBI case and MSM reporting on the case. Most peculiar indeed. Hamlet, Denmark and all that.

Given the gravity of this case and this story, why isn't Jean Duley confidently responding to questions of journalists worldwide about her knowledge of Bruce Ivins? Could it be that certain interests are keeping her under lock and key out of fear that once she starts answering pointed questions about her claims that the case against Ivins will collapse? Yet again, it sure looks like a flimsy cover-up. If the case were solid, the FBI would have Duley out there, providing support for their assertions.

I have my reasons for believing that Mr. Shane is too often a mouthpiece for agencies and people in the government that want to disseminate information while remaining unnamed. While the second half of his article (with Nicholas Wade) is all very "factual", he sticks two paragraphs in on an alcohol abuse and pornography claim that hasn't been shown, in any way I find convincing, to be anything more than character destruction.

When one looks carefully at what Russell Byrne (co-worker, and so far, staunch defender of Bruce Ivins, who doesn't believe the allegations) is saying, the image comes out differently depending on whether you factor in the FBI shift in focus over the last 7 years or not.

The article starts with an introduction that is nondescript, just good writing skills, introducing an article that will be about highly technical forensic techniques developed to solve the case. It then proceeds with paragraphs whose only possible value is character destruction and framing for Bruce Ivins. They are so irrelevant to the article that Messrs. Shane and Wade actually begin the paragraph following with, "What is more relevant,...".

Then we get a theory from Dr. Hedlund, another colleague and defender, who thinks the FBI were going after everyone in the lab, and chose the guy who was cracking the most quickly,

The investigators looked around, they decided they had to find somebody. They went after all of them but he looked the most susceptible to pressure. It is like prisoners of war: if they are harassed enough, they will be driven to do anything. But I don't believe he would have done what they say he did.

The rest of the article typifies why I don't trust Scott Shane. It frames the massive research effort to crack this case around creating an impression of very impressive science (not that the science isn't impressive, just that the article makes every step look breathtaking), in preparation for the expected FBI news conference. The FBI motive is that they want the science believed immediately. The other motive floating around is that no one wants questions on why so much money and effort has been spent. That is also obvious in the letters to the Editor in the same issue of the NYT.

Pick apart the framing and a few very strange truths emerge: The character destruction focuses on the only other industries in the FBI: the drug war (alcohol abuse) and the anti-porn war (KKG and the pictures delivered to the P.O. box). And the allegation by Byrne and Hedlund that the decision was made based on personality points to something really ugly: The FBI ran this like it was a war, like a counterterrorism/intelligence operation, not a standard criminal investigation. The interrogation tactics are out of the War on Terror, the cat and mouse was too. Pentagon-style spending. They were trying to "turn" a scientist. That's spy stuff.

It's not really a well kept secret that the FBI was changed by the Bush administration. It spends around half of its budget and efforts on domestic surveillance/counterterrorism/preventive crimefighting now. The other half goes nearly all to internet crime. Of the internet crime, most goes to "child" pornography. It really ought to be renamed the Domestic Surveillance, Suspicious Citizens, and Upholding Moral Correctness Department.

This article, though informative in parts, accomplishes for these FBI people what "Inside a 9/11Mastermind' Interrogation" did for the waterboarders: It helps the government take control of the framing, introduces the vocabulary, and points the public speculation in the direction that those who "leaked" information to Mr. Shane wanted. And now that Bruce Ivins has been properly demonized, the techniques used have been properly beatified, and the massiveness of the biodefense program that was justified on this one crime has been properly hidden, the American public has been prepared for the FBI briefing, so the first phase of the psyops for Dick Cheney's massive hidden war on bioterror, proclaimed September 20, 2001, has been put in place. Billions are spent protecting us from a threat that must be produced in an expensive laboratory by highly trained scientists and has killed 5 people. Small bombs set off by cell phones have killed thousands. And what has been spent on that? Well, the NYT had an article last week about survival camps for teenagers, and the nifty new skills they learn, like how to start a fire with a cell phone.

What would be a better article would be to examine what has happened here from the viewpoint that the FBI ran a special-ops campaign against a team of scientists at a government lab. They treated a team of scientists like a terrorist organization to infiltrate, to interrogate using techniques used for "prisoners of war", meaning prisoners in the War on Terror. People wondering when the insidiously lawless stuff would begin being used on our citizens on our soil now have their answer.

The logical next step is to begin arguing that terrorists like Dr. Ivins have no civil or human rights. Oh, yeah, they already started that when they divulged his private medical records in court, making them available to the press, and then waited long enough so that the press, which abhors a titillation vacuum, would dissect them.

What a coup it will be for the war on terror, to finally break down the barriers in American consciousness to holding Americans to be totally without rights by labeling them terrorists.