He was cast as a murderer in a high school play?!?!?!?! He MUST be the anthrax killer then.

I wonder what it means that I was cast as Bassanio when my high school performed The Merchant of Venice, particularly since I'm female.

MB

As GG pointed out, the point here is not really whether Ivins was guilty or innocent but the process by which Ivins was literally tried and found guilty and hounded, and the many liberties media took with facts, all with the blessing of govt. insiders.

Keeping the eyes on the prize will keep us off the track of wild goose chases. Left, progressive and civil libertarians have an undeserved reputation of being conspiracy theorists--a phenomenae created by right wingers trying to shout down criticism. Let's not give them fuel for the fire. It would probably be most useful to concentrate on this issue on the bigger themes of process:

1. The now healthy historical record of FBI's deliberately hamhanded investigations, and its vulnerability to political pressure.

2. Media/government collusion in disseminating misinformation. Corporate media not only was abused by government 'sources' it colluded with them and protected them. Moreover, corporate media had its own profti motive in misinforming the public on these issues.

3. The oldie but goodie--Bush admin fabrications to gin up aggression toward Iraq.

4. The Elephant in the Room--the government's own research into biological weapons, which was the very pretext used to invade Iraq in the first place. Surely, the fact that we are researching and have enough anthrax on hand to attack our enemies (and friends) should not make Americans sleep more soundly.

the sound of Glenn bitchslapping idiots in the afternoon.

From the Washington Post article you mentioned:

"The lyopholizer Ivins used in the fall of 2001 is commonly employed by pharmaceutical companies and laboratories, as well as food processors, to freeze a liquid broth of bacteria and quickly transform it into a dry solid without a thawing stage."

So doesn't that mean that whoever made the Anthrax could have picked up the dryer from an industrial food-service supply outlet? Not exactly a uncommon devoce, apparently.

Nice work, GG.

Cafe DMZ

The timeline

http://www.fredericknewspost.com/sections/news/display.htm?StoryID=78409

presented by the Frederick paper has a hole between July 25 serving of the Peace order at Fort Detrick, and July 29 admission to Frederick Memorial Hospital. In particular, there never seems to be a mention of discharge from Shephard Pratt . Was he admitted when he committed "suicide"? The hospital should produce some discharge papers because, as far as I know, hospitals drugs are dispensed by nurses. If his "overdose" was created by a nurse, it was not a suicide. Has anyone seen Ivins' Pratt discharge papers?

http://tinyurl.com/6raffh

Note how McCain sounds like a member of the Camel Club -- in fact, he uses the word "camel" in an insulting and racist way. Connect the dots, look for intersections among a number of political and social networks here, all pushing the same neoconservative agenda. And keep in mind that Bruce Ivins was a DEMOCRAT.

QUOTE

A month after 9/11, before 4 of 5 anthrax victims had died, McCain went on Letterman and said "some of this anthrax may - and I emphasize may - have come from Iraq": In the interview Letterman keeps going back to the situation Afghanistan (where U.S. military action had recently begun) while McCain keeps moving the focus to "second phases" and other countries. He concludes that maybe we can scare these other countries back into just "selling camels." Remember this is 2 weeks before the ABC News series with its unnamed four sources (wrongly) confirming an anthrax connection to Iraq. Was McCain one of the sources or just someone very close to those sources?"

END QUOTE

Is that what Glenn suspects? I don't recall getting that impression from Glenn's posts. Did I miss something?

No. This happens a lot with this process. I am putting facts together in order to demonstrate what we don't know, what needs to be examined, possible avenues that should be explored.

I honestly have no theories about what took place. My whole point is: why should we have to speculate? I'd like to see the evidence for these things, a real investigation, a disclosure of the facts.

Whenever one argues from this premise -- here are the facts, here is what we don't know, here are the unwarranted assumptions people are making --then others try to infer that you're harboring some secret suspicion or theory and try to guess at what it is.

AnnieW - thanks for reminding me; I had forgotten the leaked story about "blindfolded women". I honestly wasn't bringing up the gay/kinky angle to disparage Ivins. I'm just interested in making sense of his behavior and was doing so, as I caveated, via wild conjecture.

Ilyonnoc's post regarding porn and Catholic guilt was especially enlightening. I can see now how someone with a profile possibly matching Ivins' - private, solitary, work-oriented and yes, depressed and possibly guilt-ridden - might be driven to suicide without throwing anything else into the mix.

I'm glad, too, to see other posters picking up on the Spertzel article I linked to back on page 5, though I do think his broader conclusions about the possible source of the spores are dubious.

Link in my sig.

Content:

Jean Duley

1330 Hampshire Dr. #7E

Frederick, Maryland, United States

Email: aubrey1991@aol.com

I am currently working on a Fiction/bio on life filled with story and full speed head long drama. I want to write for any publication that wants real life stories and stories about poeple.

Interests: My passion is people, their lives, their interests, the world and how it works. I want to know how and what has happened to people and how their lives have affected others. I have studied sociology and Addictions.

Published writer: No

Freelance: Yes

"The lyopholizer Ivins used in the fall of 2001 is commonly employed by pharmaceutical companies and laboratories, as well as food processors, to freeze a liquid broth of bacteria and quickly transform it into a dry solid without a thawing stage."

[...] Not exactly a uncommon device, apparently. -- Cafe DMZ

No, its a common piece of machinery in medical and biochemical labs, as are the banks of high-speed centrifuges needed to separate something like these spores from the broth + cell matter they grow in or on. But its not something you can set up in your basement.

Jim I have gotten the sense that you believe the anthrax samples mailed in this attack were purified and prepped at either Dugway or West Jefferson. That if then Fedexed to Ft. Detrick in order to work with them in legitimate vaccine research, they would have been sent as a paste. How then would they have been dried or otherwise prepped to the consistency of the material in those letters? The FBI forensic work cited in the recent NYT article on this issue sounds quite thorough & complete, and pinpointed Ivins lab as the source. Would a couple of passes through a lyophilizer like that in Ivins Ft. Detrick lab be all that would be needed to do this, given sufficiently high-quality starting material? If they were already using lyophilizers in that lab for vaccine prep, they have got to have had a way to protect and segregate the pumps from the vacuum chamber. Or a protocol for decontaminating them. Probably both.