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.

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.

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?

While the FBI publishes the new DNA methods that determined the exact strain of anthrax, and put it in Dr. Ivins' personal flask, all along the simplest way to convict is/was to confirm Dr. Ivins wrote those letters. The first one went out 9/18/08 – ahead of Dr. Ivins purported 9/26/08 email, (some news sources still claim this email was sent prior to 9/11)and incredibly quickly on the heels of the 9/11 attack...funny that. Meanwhile well before any attacks by a purported lone unknown madman with anthrax, high-placed officials were alleged to be taking Cipro – why? Were they psychic?

Here's a graphologist's profile of the person who wrote those letters , and sure, Ivins could fit that bill – but let's see his handwriting. It's not so easy to alter basic characteristics in one's handwriting/printing– pressure, spacing, emphasis, strokes, size, margins - despite attempts at disguise. http://www.richardfrasermd.com/anthraxletters.html

As a sometime amateur/hobbyist graphologist, I still think those letters were written by two different people (no punctuation inconsistent pressure,hesitant with overstrikes in one; solid, fluid, consistent strokes, purposeful punctuation in the other.) Oh, well that's my 2 cents.

Well yes, if this was a forum, but it is not. It is a place where comments are made to the author of a blog post at Salon. In that regard the software is fine. In fact Salon looks at them as "letters to the editor" like in your local paper.

I have often wished that Salon would put in a real forum where we could interact. Perhaps modeled after the forums you see all over the Internet. It is not that they can not, or do not know how; it is that they do not want to do so at this time.

Perhaps a group here could figure out a way to list positive benefits to Salon itself that would convince the powers that be that a real forum would be a useful and attractive addition.

Go for it.

LWG

Left Wing Gatekeeper!

I'm out for awhile.

Play nice and have fun kidz!

This McBride character just might be on to something, here.....

-- arrenfrank

:-)

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/

Okay, let's go with crank. What inferences relative, or gemane, to the anthrax investigation do you draw from it if present?

I'm not trying to be a pain in the butt, or harass you on this. I'd really like to follow you logic on how Ivins ingesting crank might shed some light on who developed and carried out the attack.

Point of posting the Gertz article was just that when Ivins wrote in the Sept 26 email that he had "heard tonight" about Bin Laden acquiring anthrax and sarin, he was telling the truth and the (still ongoing) attempts to spin that email as suspicious are baseless.

No searching, no sorting, no browsing by headers, no filtering, no threading... Many topics in the Bruce Ivins discussion are petering out...because of the primitive software.

This McBride character just might be on to something, here.....