You've more than earned it.

Many thanks!

...is on Reliable Sources right now.

Ironic.

Of course he is there to discuss the Edwards affair.

The segment just ended and the subject of anthrax must have slipped their mind.

have a good vacation!

After listening to your podcast with Jay Rosen yesterday I'm curious about who at the White House pushed the doubt on the presence of Bentonite after Ari Fleischer had definitively stated that there was none. This seems to me to be a favor to Ross to keep him from looking like a total fool and to garner more hang time for the ABC story to keep repeating itself. Any ideas?

That's what it comes down to -- if he wasn't at the mailbox, he didn't do it and all the circumstantial noise is meaningless.

Which is why the FBI is emitting all noise, no signal and which is why it's smart to filter out the noise.

Enjoy your vacation.

Maybe there are enough pissed off fbi people involved in the investigation that would allow these inconsistencies and transparent falsehoods to escape from their bosses rather than correct them. Sort of like the recent Gitmo sentencing where it appears as though the jurors all did things according to the rules but still sabotaged the party line.

GG, have a great break, and I truly hope you will not post, nor think about posting.

The answer to this necessarily has to be speculative. In the absence of an independent inquiry, it can only remain speculative.

There are two questions to be answered. The smaller one is of Ivins' alibi for the September 17/18 mailing. It must be that Ivins has a fairly solid alibi for the September 17th evening and night - this is a weak inference from the fact that "officials" thought it fit to leak about the administrative leave which is by the FBI's own case really irrelevant.

The larger question is why does the FBI, which is constituted by many intelligent, honest and hardworking men and women, seem so bungling and collectively stupid?

Again, the answer is a weak inference only - in my experience, organizations act as much less than the sum of the parts when the leadership has some predetermined outcome that they want which flies in the face of reality. In the Amerithrax case, I'd wager that the FBI agents' ability to create and modify hypotheses based on discovered facts has been severely curtailed, and that they have been forced to support a predetermined result rather than come up with a true result. (The true result may very well be that there is not enough evidence to ever identify the perpetrators.)

----

Now onto even weaker speculation -

Among various things, it is interesting that almost from the very start, the FBI has been certain that it is a lone perpetrator. But it seems to me that the FBI has great difficulty in making the facts fit just one person.

http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/ap.html

Feb 25, 2002 -

"Van Harp, assistant director of the bureau's Washington office, wrote that the FBI believes that a single person, with experience working in a laboratory, is behind the mailings. Harp described this person as having ``a clear, rational thought process and appears to be very organized in the production and mailing of these letters.''

Fleischer said the source of the anthrax definitely was domestic, and the block handwriting on the letters seemed ``chosen by design'' to throw off investigators.

Harp also said the FBI believes that, because the mailed anthrax was of the so-called ``Ames strain'' of Bacillus anthracis, the suspect probably has or had legitimate access to biological agents in a laboratory. Harp also described the suspect as ``standoffish'' and preferring to work alone rather than in groups.

``It is possible this person used off-hours in a laboratory or may have even established an improvised or concealed facility comprised of sufficient equipment to produce the anthrax,'' Harp said.

Harp's description was in a letter sent to the Washington-based American Association for Microbiology, which published the letter Feb. 1 on its Web site. "

BUT the FBI insists on the Maryland lab because the envelope the anthrax was mailed in was likely sold in VA or MD, (home to many or most federal offices).

This, with no evidence whatsoever of the location of, or method of, "weaponization" of the anthrax.

And that is their ONLY physical evidence. They could never have convicted Ivins.

The story has broken in quite a few places:

"FBI's Anthrax Investigation Follows Pattern Of Botching The Big Ones" By GABRIEL SCHOENFELD, August 10, 2008,

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/commentary/hc-commentaryanthrax0810.artaug10,0,4020969.story

The bureau's horrific track record before 9/11, and its single-minded focus on Hatfill after the anthrax attacks, raises the suspicion that, in the dramatic events of last week, we are glimpsing yet another monumental screw-up, one fully worthy of the FBI's inglorious recent past.

Regardless of what kind of investigation arises from this, there is likely to be a great deal of political pressure to keep Project Bioshield and the public-private partnerships out of the discussion, since that involves giving billions of dollars to private companies for biodefense work. This is actually the wrong approach to countering bioterrorism: infrastructure and public health professionals are more important for that, and there really is very little defense against the worst case bio-Hiroshima scenarios, no matter what you do.

The other issue is expanding international biowarfare treaties, which would mean inspection regimes for all labs that worked with any dangerous and weaponizable microorganisms. The public-private partnerships in biowarfare are dead set against this, as it would mean revealing exactly what they are up to (intellectual property right concerns - in biowarfare?).

The larger global and political concerns were outlined by Johnathan Tucker at the Arms Control Association: http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_10/Tucker

Beyond the legal issue of treaty compliance, the fact that the United States was conducting classified threat-assessment studies raised broader political concerns. Particularly troubling to many countries was the fact that the United States had not reported the secret projects in its annual confidence-building measure (CBM) declarations, which were introduced by the BWC Review Conferences in 1986 and 1991 to strengthen the treaty.

Because the United States had long portrayed its CBM submissions as the standard for other countries to follow, the omission of classified projects from the U.S. declarations damaged Washington’s credibility with respect to the benign nature of its biodefense program.

If Iran had conducted the same projects in secret, for instance, the U.S. government would almost certainly have accused Tehran of violating the BWC.

Moreover, in justifying the omissions, the Bush administration seemed to imply that the CBMs—and, by extension, the BWC itself—only covered Defense Department activities and not those conducted by the CIA and other agencies. If this interpretation is allowed to stand, it would tear a gaping loophole in the treaty regime.

Ike Solem