The FBI said there was one type of anthrax, from one flask, kept by one scientist, at one US Army lab. If this is true then why the hell did it take 7 YEARS(!) to figure out where the crap came from!

Secondly, If this guy was suffering from severe mental illnes and kept emailing people about it how come he was able to continue working in such a sensitive area?

I'm late to the party, but has anyone commented that the latest search warrant (of Ivins' house, shed, and 3 cars, executed on Jul 12) produced "No items seized"?

Huh. I guess the items are all in Syria by now.

I also noticed that the warrant is the source of the misinformation that Ivins sent the damning email before the attacks, and the omission of the "I heard tonight" phrase, not the MSM. So the newspapers simply repeated it without checking it. Perhaps they will notice now that the warrant documents have been released.

Suppose, just suppose, that the FBI revamped their investigation in 2006, and really thought they were making progress, and said so. Now suppose people put pressure on them to bring their case to court by Fall of 2008. What would they do? Start pressuring their presumed defendant. They didn't have everything they needed, so they started putting the thumbscrews on. Same way that when a military intelligence unit is told that people are dying because they aren't coming up with intelligence they "take the gloves off".

Only it backfires. The presumed defendant cracks, commits suicide, and their case is still half-baked.

The people who would put pressure on a case like this to come to a head in September (at least one report said they were 5 weeks out from an indictment), so that they could show the world that they were keeping people safe from the terrorist threat are who? Same people who put pressure on the military commissions to get a 9/11 conviction this fall? Same people who switched all the attorneys out so they could tamper with the voting lists? Same people who are ratcheting up support for electronic voting right now, and changing the subject to a debate on offshore drilling? Same people who know that if an honest election is held right now they don't have a chance of winning, and that losing might mean prosecutions and the end of a theory of the unitary imperator.

Maybe the FBI isn't being massively dishonest, just trying to push a case that has been screwed up by pressure, reacting to their own disappointment at not getting the conclusion they wanted, and covering their own asses.

If so, the same people pressuring them would be the same ones who benefited by Brian Ross' original link to Iraq. All I'm saying is that the FBI behavior is predictable from premises other than that they are participants in a conspiracy. There are people who have a lot more at stake here than a $250 billion vaccine contract, and have used just such show trial tactics this very week, in a "courtroom" at Guantanamo.

The problem is, some bright people here are trying to conduct a complex discussion about an incredibly complex controversy. It's like trying to play a Rachmaninoff piano concerto wearing boxing gloves. Perhaps the discussion should be moved to a website that can handle complex discussions on complex topics. If Salon isn't sharp enough to use or develop software that can handle the load its articles generate, then users will move elsewhere to pursue the discussions. It's certainly in Salon's self-interest to make its website as sticky as possible.

Some BBS software from the 1980s is more capable than Salon's commenting and discussion system.

I haven't had time to read all the responses, so my apologies if someone covered this evidence more fully...I'd like to see an evaluation from a full clinical forensic psychologist on Dr. Ivins around 2001. I'm no expert, but I did go to graduate school for clinical forensic psychology before going in a different direction... as an intern at St. Elizabeth's I witnessed evaluations, and even on a preliminary basis they answer a lot of outstanding questions.

On the mental health evidence: Paranoid Personality Disorder does not equal homicide. I won't say that as an absolute, but it's close...the diagnosis of "personality disorder" implies he has a distorted way of interpreting events, but not active delusions. Those would be almost certainly required for someone who saw fit to potentially kill dozens of people. In fact, as Dr. Nass mentions, the care taken in executing the attacks (and more importantly, faking the source!) doesn't jive with any paranoid psychotic state, much less the axis 2 "personality disorder". People who are in that place want the world to know they are defending themselves from attack, and would shout it from a rooftop if they could. The organization in the execution of the attacks would be more suited to someone with anti-social personality disorder, i.e., your garden variety serial killer. Someone who wants to hide what they've done.

Also, Paranoid Personality Disorder seemed like something less than a full diagnosis and given well after the attacks. No evidence on his mental health at the time, which is paramount. Honestly, if someone is in a place where they would do this and doesn't want to hide it, people around them will know. (Of course, I wouldn't rule out that they did and aren't saying, or we haven't seen it...but that would obviously be critical evidence.)

Right now, there's nothing that shows someone who would plan these attacks. There's a smattering of honestly, fairly low-grade mental health issues. An emergent hold is not low-grade, but it happened years later and not in a manner consistent with the attacks. I'm not saying that more damning mental health evidence doesn't exist, given how sketchy the records released are, but given his willingness to seek help it would be somewhere if it existed at all.

Maybe the FBI isn't being massively dishonest, just trying to push a case that has been screwed up by pressure, reacting to their own disappointment at not getting the conclusion they wanted, and covering their own asses.

More of a cliche, by now. We know this is how our Govt works in the best of times. You don't even need a conspiracy. It just happens.

And I agree that the FBI is not inherently dishonest, any more than the CIA or EPA or any other agency is when run by an appointed governor general whose values and goals contradict those of the agency, i/e., are political. Although they will happily stoop to unethical behavior when pressured to do so.