No, I'm thinking more in terms of a red coat and a large hat. Click my name. I hope this works; I was planning to save it for when we have a link to the DOJ document dump, but it works now with what you have said. And I think that looks more a like a cross between Glenn and Marcy than me...

Jim White

You should be wearing a cape and unitard. ;-}

Ah, thanks for that cheeky little bright spot in my morning.

Pedinska cheeky?

Ahhhhhh

Do you know a bombshell when you see it? I do.

Lewis Libby was one of the leading neoconservatives in the Bush 43 administration who used the 9/11 attacks and the closely linked 9/11 anthrax attacks to drive the United States into a disastrous multi-trillion dollar war against Iraq.

If the bogus assault on Bruce Ivins is part of a cover-up, what is being covered up? The pieces are beginning to come together quite nicely.

The Anthrax Prosecutor: The Daughter of the Defense Attorney for BushCo’s “Germ Boy”

http://tinyurl.com/2etnkl

QUOTE

Guess who they've got prosecuting the anthrax case? Amy Jeffress, daughter of Bill Jeffress, the guy who was last seen trying to keep Scooter Libby, known within the Administration as "Mr. Germ," out of the pokey. Yeah. That gives me confidence in the investigation.

Here's Jeremy Scahill on Libby's role as "Germ Boy" within the administration.

In mid-2002, as they struggled desperately to sell the war, these key players in "Plamegate" were engaged in full-out offensive aimed at convincing Americans that the country faced an imminent threat of a smallpox attack. To underscore this "threat," Libby began fanatically pressing to have the entire US population preemptively vaccinated against smallpox (which was declared eradicated in 1980).

[snip]

What Hauer and his colleagues at HHS may not have known is that smallpox was a career-long obsession of Libby's--so much so that his nickname in the administration was "Germ Boy."

[snip]

More than a decade later, Libby was facing renewed frustration with another group of experts challenging his obsession.

END QUOTE

Thanks, PTA Mom, for your post of the hearing transcript, and to macgupta for the link to the WP article.

Stints in rehab, followed by relapses with alcohol and prescription medications, with increasingly erratic behavior and statements (angry emails about fighting back alternating with crying at his desk, for example) - this is exactly how you would expect a private, work-centered person with tendencies to depression and alcoholism to react to hyper-aggressive law enforcement intimidation.

His death also now reads clearly as either a circumstantial accidental overdose or suicide-while-intoxicated, not something that resulted from any serious thought or plan. To me this truly sad ending is in itself is an argument aginst Ivins being the sort of person who could have cold-bloodly plotted murder by biological agent (not to even mention the fact that the work to which he was so obviously dedicated was preventing that kind of fatality).

On the other hand, I was startled how coached or fabricated Duley's testimony seemed. Rather than the statements of someone remembering specific, startling incidents she had personally witnessed in a drug rehab context, her testimony struck me as hesitant, stilted, and vague, as if she were trying to remember what she was supposed to say, not recalling actually experienced events. It's certainly possible that Ivins made reckless, aggressive statements as his condition deteriorated - he was, after all, not delusional about Duley cooperating with the FBI - but the general impression of a vengeful serial killer with hatred for women out to whack all his co-workers seems right out of a bad 90's movie.

In following this amazingly freakish yet not wholly suprising story, I've found myself drawn to the human side of things, such as who Ivins really was and what that possibly can tell us about his likely guilt or innocence. With what we already know it's hard to imagine this man having anything to do with the anthrax plot, particularly since absolutely nothing has surfaced suggesting he exhibited any kind of aberrant or irrational or incriminating behavior then. If he had sent anthrax to Duley in July, for example, it would at least have made some psychological sense. Ivins sending it to tabloid editors and Democratic politicians in October 2001 is plain off-the-charts implausible.

In following this amazingly freakish yet not wholly suprising story, I've found myself drawn to the human side of things, such as who Ivins really was...

Me too. As we learn more, I hope you write again.

Obviously you have credentials, and as I wrote the other day, I've found all of the informatioin you've supplied intriguing but, at the risk of sounding like a complete a-hole, can you put all of your research and contract amounts and citations into your own personal lyophilizer and purify it down to a simple thesis in one or two sentences?

You're starting to sound like Art Bell. That the anthrax lab was privitized means nothing. That government contracts are worth millions is a given. That ex-military men like admirals become insiders and sit on boards for private companies is business as usual.

Putting all these unpleasant but relatively mundane facts together in order to give the impression that there's a there there doesn't cut it.

Give the exact articulatioin points -- who was pulling the strings? Who felt they had to start sending anthrax in the mail in order to win contracts a day or two after the deadliest attack in the history of our country without waiting to see if the 9/11 attacks would be impetus enough to get what they wanted simply by asking?

I'd like to read your declaritive staement about who you think engineered this for profit, how that person or persons was sure to profit from it at that time not two to five years later and why their plan necessitated the specific targets chosen.

She coauthored Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. The publication date of the hardcover edition is given on Amazon as Oct. 2, 2001, but Amazon also has several customer reviews dating from the week after 9/11, with the earliest being Sept. 13.