Glenn has update to new radio interview with NJ congressman Rush Holt. You can sign anthrax congressional investigation ad petition if you are the first 1,000 to reply.

The only hint that Ivins might have been secretly gay was the brother calling him "wussy" and being suprised that Ivin's could ever get married. The nutjob brother based this on Ivin's being a caregiver for their cancer ridden mother. This makes my head spin.

Ivin's obviously wasn't a thick skinned as Hatfill who seems to have had to training to take this kind of attack.

I don't know many that could take that kind of onslaught.

p.s. If the porn had been kinky we would already know, the worst they could come up with is some of the women were blindfolded, not bound. This is a guy that was ashamed to read vanilla porn...

We needed a bit of comedy here. The atmosphere was getting a bit thick, after all.

-- Iokannan in the Well

I think it is some of the commenters who are getting a bit thick.

Rick Perlstein, (left wing gatekeeper and neocon corporatist stooge) dug up some of Ivins' letter to the editor, which you can read at the link to the link. He also links to Glenn's article on 8/1. As I said, without knowing who he voted for, and we cannot, the fact he was a registered Democrat is really not much to go on, but interesting.

The question of right-wing terrorism: anthrax

[...]

This guy was no down-the-line conservative ("The Roman Catholic Church should learn from other equally worthy Christian denominations and eagerly welcome female clergy as well as married clergy," he writes in March of 2002), but I hope I don't exaggerate in claiming a decidedly wingnutty tilt to his thinking. If this is the same guy who composed the note framing jihadists for the anthrax attacks ("This is next/Take Penacilin Now/Death To America/Death To Israel/Allah is great"); and, as Greenwald seems to suspect, and if he was the same guy who misled ABC into reporting the presence in the anthrax of a substance that only Iraq had used to create biological weapons, what we may have on our hands here is an American ginning up a causis belli for a Christian jihad against Islam, and killing fellow Americans to do it.

This is very, very heavy stuff. If any of this turns out to be the case, I will, again, take no pleasure in the vindication.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2008083101/question-right-wing-terrorism-anthrax

Now I will retire for awhile and return the asylum to the control of the newer inmates (lunatics).

Richard Spertzel weighs in:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121789293570011775.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries&nn=2

Mr. Spertzel, head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom from 1994-99, was a member of the Iraq Survey Group.

[Expanding a bit on peacelove's post:]

Richard Spertzel, August 5, 2008, The Wall Street Journal:

http://tinyurl.com/6e9u8n

The Wall Street Journal, and Richard Spertzel, head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom from 1994-99, have just clearly stated that they think the FBI has probably destroyed the life of an innocent man -- Bruce Ivins -- and that the real terrorists behind the 9/11 anthrax attacks inside the U.S. government are still at large and fully capable of repeating their attacks. Think about it! This situation is so outrageous in so many ways that it boggles the mind.

BEGIN QUOTE

The FBI has not officially released information on why it focused on Ivins, and whether he was about to be charged or arrested. And when the FBI does release this information, we should all remember that the case needs to be firmly based on solid information that would conclusively prove that a lone scientist could make such a sophisticated product.

From what we know so far, Bruce Ivins, although potentially a brilliant scientist, was not that man. The multiple disciplines and technologies required to make the anthrax in this case do not exist at Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Inhalation studies are conducted at the institute, but they are done using liquid preparations, not powdered products.

The FBI spent between 12 and 18 months trying "to reverse engineer" (make a replica of) the anthrax in the letters sent to Messrs. Daschle and Leahy without success, according to FBI news releases. So why should federal investigators or the news media or the American public believe that a lone scientist would be able to do so?

END QUOTE

Glenn, in stating that the FBI must be leaking their best case, is assuming that he understands the motives of the FBI in this case, which he may, or he may not.

Those who have read at Humanity Against Crimes know that I spent a fair amount of time on the timeline for torture, and on the motives for it, as well. Generally there are a small set of motives for torture, they are laid out in detail in the CAT.

But now Jane Mayer comes out with a new motive that precipitated the first documented torture of a high-value detainee, the extraordinary rendition of Ibn al Shaykh al Libi to Egypt, which occurred around the middle of October, 2001 (it was definitely before October 26th, as pesky details started surfacing in Pakistan that day).

Turns out that the FBI interrogation of al Libi was going very, very well, and producing actionable intelligence, and to the point of turning al Libi with deals about asylum for his wife and kids and so forth.

While the CIA jealousy over this state of affairs is mentioned, the real reason he was taken to Egypt and tortured was to prevent standard law enforcement techniques (up to and including reading him his Miranda rights) from registering a success, thereby helping those that thought that al Qaeda should be dealt with as a criminal affair. The motive for the torture was not any of the standard ones, not confession, not prejudice, not creating terror among the masses, and certainly not to get information. It was to prevent a law enforcement success that would have prevented the War on Terror and the subversion of the rule of law, by questioning the most fundamental premise of the Bush administration: That war was a better response to terrorism than law enforcement and the dark side was a more effective means of fighting than the honorable or legal methods.

I'm mentioning this because I already expressed my misgivings for swallowing Scott Shane's article on the last thread, and because I question whether anyone can truly say what game the FBI is playing and whether or not there has been any incompetence at all in what they are doing right now.

Personally, I believe they are running a counterterrorism scenario, together with a lot of psyops, could give a hoot about how badly it botches their criminal investigation, and might even be welcoming the reactions to their leaks. Nobody but a few doctors bleating ineffectually in the Letters column of the NYT is talking about the sheer size of the bioterrorism program that has been put together, or questioning how much of a threat bioterrorism really is. They have notoriously untalkative lab researchers spilling their emotions and unqualified judgments to the press. They have confirmed the use of a ton of pornography surveillance as a weapon to discredit someone, and have a gauge as to how well it works. Only a few friends are criticizing the interrogation tactics of the FBI against a man's family, they have successfully created a drumbeat for violating all of the standard privacy protections to suicide victim's families because the public is demanding information, perhaps exactly as desired. Everybody wants to know more, whether they are entitled to or not. So much for FISA debates and civil liberties, the public is willing to sanction delving into every member of the therapy group's private medical lives to find out what Bruce Ivins said in their presence. Everyone is focusing on the facts of the case, no one cares anymore about why the FBI acted this way. And they get to close the investigation before a new administration arrives to question their motives.

When something is too incompetent to be believed, sometimes it isn't. Brownie and Rove ran the Katrina recovery. Louisiana has a Republican governor. Incompetence?