Everyone is jumping to conclusions in here. No one really has seen all their evidence. You can blame it on a frame, but I think we need to wait until it's all in. They probably should look at whether Ivins' death was really a suicide or an accidental overdoes and toxicity. He had been drinking heavily and had past drinking problems. He had been in DeTOXs programs twice in the past few years.

So who s going to make the first movie?

Both are excellent explanations for Ivins' time in Suite B3 (doing extra work, needing a retreat) - and I feel that both better explain the time than the anthrax-letter-production theory in the search warrant affidavit. (my apologies for lack of detail - I should learn not to write on an empty stomach)

What I would like to suggest is that the time Ivins spent in Suite B3 before 9/11 is a strong counter-argument to the DOJs implications. Because Ivins' evening hours in Suite B3 start increasing in the month prior to 9/11, the onset of Ivins' increased hours in B3 cannot be attributed to motives initiated by 9/11.

The motives described in the "07-524-M-01 search warrant affidavit" document are bewilderingly weak (PATRIOT act? Did criticism of it go back in time to the person who mailed the anthrax?). Thrown against a timeline, I am pretty sure it would melt away.

Investigative journalist Gerald Posner makes some salient comments on Countdown tonight about how the anthrax in the flask under Ivins' control couldn't have been the same anthrax delivered in those envelopes.

Check it out on the rerun show later, or on YouTube tomorrow.

Ike, where does the government say silica coated?

Here's another sad part about Greendale. They talk about the name, but not the address. The address was a small town with an inaccurate zipcode, whose border is near the small town. The theory was that someone familiar with Central New Jersey would do that. By memory. Familiar with the local towns and zip codes living near by, but made a small error.

If Ivins picked that town out of the blue on the internet, he would have found the correct zip code. But the perp didn't look it up, he probably did it by memory, which explains the small error.

Reading the evidence of Ivins being a right-wing zealot, now that we know he was a registered Democrat since at least the early nineties, strikes me as something grafted on the case in order to justify Ivins' guilt.

My guess is that they used the same thing in their case against Hatfill. Hatfill, according to his resume, fought with white supremacists in Rhodesia where there is strong evidence that they USED anthrax as a bioterror agent. Who knows? Maybe the feds kept these guys around just to have a patsy or two in reserve if the first story (Iraq) didn't survive scrutiny.

Earlier news stories claimed that the envelopes used in the attacks had been traced to the post office in Frederick MD.

From 08-431Affidavid07524:

"Approximately 45 million Federal eagle 6 3/4" envelopes were manufactured . . . exclusively for and sold solely by the U.S. Postal Service between January 8, 2001 and June 2002.

Subsequent to the attacks, an effort was made to collect all such envelopes for possible forensic examination, including the identification of defects that occur during the envelope manufacturing process. As a result of this collection, envelopes with printing defects identical to printing defects identified on the envelopes utilized in the anthrax attacks during the fall of 2001 were collected from the Fairfax Main post office in Fairfax, Virginia and the Cumberland and Elkton post offices in Maryland. . . . Given that the printing defects identified on the envelopes used in the attacks are transient, thereby being present on only a small population of the federal eagle envelopes produced, and that envelopes with identical printing defects to those identified on the envelopes used in the attacks were recovered from post offices serviced by the Dulles SDO, it is reasonable to conclude that the federal eagle envelopes utilized in the attacks were purchased from a post office in Maryland or Virginia."

That last sentence doesn't sound logical.

Major Premise: Printing defects are present on only a small portion of all envelopes

Minor Premise: Identical printing defects to those used in the attacks were found in Maryland and Virginia post offices

Conclusion: Attacker likely bought the envelopes in Virginia and Maryland

How many other states received some of the 45 million envelopes, and did any of them have the same printing defects?

Maybe there's more detail somewhere else, but this sounds inconclusive at best.

"Everyone is jumping to conclusions in here. No one really has seen all their evidence."

Trust me, this is the best they got.

Everyone is jumping to conclusions in here.

No, they are most certainly not. They are doing something completely different than jumping to conclusions. They are examining and discussing the documents and media coverage, and doing additional web research. It's very interesting, and some very highly qualified people are contributing. I suggest you (and I) use spel-chek all the time, cause they're the kind that doesn't have to. Gotta tip-toe around those guys, too.

What conclusion have they jumped to, by the way?

It's just that if there was a list of FBI talking points, and one compared it to your posts, they'd be almost identical.

For example, you raise the claim that Bacillus anthracis might produce a silica coating "naturally" - that is a talking point that the FBI was pressing during their investigation of Steven Hatfill. They had a problem coming up with a scenario in which he could have made the powder himself - the FBI even commissioned an attempt to make the powder using off-the-shelf equipment, lyophilizers etc, and completely failed to replicate it - and so they then floated the "anyone could have done it" meme.

The issue isn't about whether the anthrax came from Dugway (it could also have come from Battelle Memorial in West Jefferson Ohio, who also has a record of classified anthrax development for the military). It is primarily about the nature of the weapon itself: pure spores treated with a top-secret military recipe to produce a weapon that not only contaminated the entire Hart Senate Office building, but all the mailrooms between Trenton NJ and Washington as well. Made in a basement with a lyophilizer? Hardly.

Dugway has made the stuff however, and Fort Detrick has not:

The New York Times, December 13, 2001 Thursday

U.S. Recently Produced Anthrax In a Highly Lethal Powder Form

BYLINE: By WILLIAM J. BROAD and JUDITH MILLER

...A spokeswoman at Dugway, Paula Nicholson, said the powdered anthrax produced that year was a different strain from the one used in the recent mail attacks that have killed five people. Dugway officials said powdered anthrax was also produced in other years but declined to say whether any of it was the Ames strain, the type found in the letters sent to two senators and news organizations. Government records show that Dugway has had the Ames strain since 1992.

And then, within weeks, the story vanished. FBI Director Mueller apparently publicly announced that no investigation of Battelle or Dugway was going to happen, and he appointed Richard Lambert to lead the investigation away from them and towards Hatfill from 2002-2006, and now a new team is leading it towards Ivins. Lambert was appointed to Knoxville TN, coincidentally home of Battelle's large Oak Ridge nuclear division, also a (minor) biowarfare research center. Odd, isn't it?

As part of the effort, they tried to discredit the findings of USAMRIID and AFIP researchers regarding the high-tech spore preparation, by repeatedly claiming it was a low-tech prep (an effort that Ed Lake played a major role in).

Think about this: given the current economic situation, does it really make any sense to spend a billion dollars on anthrax vaccines right now? They'd be useless in an anthrax attack - the vaccination process takes six months!

Ike Solem

ike_solm@hotmail.com