“All good lies start with the truth” - Sticky Pete

“The formula for the con is no different from that of the corporation, they are based upon one principle - self gain.” - Billy ‘Salt’ Peters

“How fortunate for leaders that men do not think” - Adolf Hitler

“A good confidence man might be very smart, but he must be very tricky.” Jimmy the con Jones

Yes, Sheila Casey fits the bill perfectly. Very nice effort - lots of factual evidence up front, and then we get to the punchline, but first, consider the source...

What else does Sheila Casey do? According to the Wayback Machine, we've got "Sheila Casey REALTOR Northern Virgina Real Estate (2005)"... gee... who else is headquartered in Northern Virgina, I wonder. Is this the quality? Shoddy at best.

Here's another nice quote from her website:

"Jon Stewart, I hope you have a good bodyguard."

Threaten people much?

Sheila Casey is also an avowed "911 truther" - here is another nice quote from her website:

"In today's post, Glen Greenwald sounds like a truther!"

Obviously, that's a deliberate attempt to tie Glenn to the lunatic theories around 9/11, which we will ignore.

But the real issue, the anthrax case, comes up in her linked post, when she trots out this nonsense:

Who had the expertise to weaponize anthrax?

William C. Patrick III, and Ken Alibek.

No, far more people than these retired old-timers had the necessary expertise, although many of them might have been trained by or have been acquainted with Bill Patrick. Personally, I would say that Battelle's for-profit spinoff, Battelle Pulmonary Therapeutics, is a far more likely suspect - Bill Patrick and Ken Alibek are not active scientists with access to the BattellePharma Electrospray Nebulizer... nor are their anthrax immunizations too likely to be current, as they work as consultants.

Yes, all good lies start with the truth - and Sheila Casey, assuming that is her real name, is just a well-practiced liar.

Thanks for providing an example of the deliberate floating of nonsensical conspiracy theories by PR firms, though - people might have thought I was barking mad otherwise.

I personally think the whole case against Ivins turns on his opportunity to mail the letters and on their postmarked date. If it turns out that it was impossible for him to mail them, then he had nothing to do with the crime or, horrors!, it was a conspiracy.

No, this is a criminal case that rests largely on the forensic evidence recovered from the crime scenes: the New York Post, Daschle and Leahy letters, as well as anthrax spores collected all along the mail route from Princeton to New York.

The FBI, having completely flubbed their forensics, deliberately it seems, has no case at all against anyone.

The only plausible "FBI conspiracy" is one to draw attention away from the public-private partnerships that are currently running the U.S. biowarfare (sorry, biodefense) program under the guise of "Project Bioshield".

Battelle is a private "non-profit" military R&D corporation, the world's largest R&D corporation, with most of their funding coming straight from the U.S. government. If it turns out that the anthrax attacks are related to one of their commercial spin-off projects, it could bring the entire privatization program to a grinding halt. That's probably why the Bush-appointed head honchos at the FBI sabotaged the investigation - and yes, that is a fact - their field agents have even filed formal complaints against the Bureau on this - straight from the LA Times, July 2008 (at link):

Nevertheless, for the next four years Lambert kept FBI and postal investigators focused on Hatfill, according to people familiar with the case.

Some dissatisfied agents sought a review of Lambert by the bureau's Inspection Division, which evaluates FBI operations. "There were complaints about him," one agent told The Times. "Did he take energy away from looking at other people? The answer is yes."

On and on and on...

What else does Sheila Casey do? According to the Wayback Machine, we've got "Sheila Casey REALTOR Northern Virgina Real Estate (2005)"... gee... who else is headquartered in Northern Virgina, I wonder.

Impeccable research. Inescapable air tight conclusions. Well done sir.

Did you say you worked at realclimate.org?

... it is inconceivable that the FBI would be permitted to continue to conceal the evidence it possesses and to avoid having to answer very probing questions from a genuinely independent and subpoena-endowed body."

Why inconceivable? The FBI discloses nothing that would in any way tarnish its reputation as the greatest domestic surveillance and investigative agency in the world.

It has been directly engaged in the unwarranted NSA domestic wiretaps, but never reported any of it to Congress, much less the American public; it has failed utterly in dozens of prosecutions of alleged "terrorists" with frivolous and exaggerated claims thrown out of court; and dozens of other botched investigations.

Permission? Congress has no interest in discrediting the FBI, nor any other agency they blindly fund at exhorbitant levels and never investigate, much less issue administrative subpoena.

Seems perfectly normal to me.

Quite frankly, you are off-base if you think that I am some sort of disinfo specialist. Nor am I a cargo-cultist who takes what falls from helicopters as some gift of the gods (as did the New Guinea natives whose impressions of the US military in WWII gave rise to their superstition that they were the gods). I feel that every bit of leak and official release of our government is suspect, but I also do not think that the government always acts monolithically. I think that if it did, the official story that Saddam and Atta and bin Laden were working together (however implausible) would be holy writ and that everything would be built on that. We aren't all one religion here, and neither is our government.

The administration is not the FBI or vice versa, though things like the USA Patriot Act and Homeland Security would like more of that centralized control over the messages that get out. Somehow, the truth has a way of rearing its head, even in the Whack-a-Mole orbits of the Beltway. While it is true that you cannot always assume that there is bad blood between agencies (Good Cop/ Bad Cop being so integral to their games), it is also the case that the anthrax, in particular, was supposed to be fathered off onto someone who could be used to promote the new product, the GWOT, and it looks like FBI wasn't cooperating.

If it was, that would mean that it was holding in abeyance the conclusion that the anthrax was domestic for when the troops in Iraq could not succeed in finding any labs which might have been able to produce it. Just as an aside, though, do you remember when the story went out that other countries were being victimized by anthrax mailings? I seem to recall several European countries allegedly got contaminated mail. That story died pretty fast. Wonder how and why it did. But here too, recall that not every country skips to the same beat as the Bush administration, even if they members of the G-8.

As for my remark about Ivins -- I only sought to eliminate him once and for all as a suspect, but reserved judgment on whether that could be done if some possible confederate could be added (and perhaps renditioned and tortured of course, to get the "full monty").

Even if you cast your net as wide as cargocult and see in all of this corporate machinations (that's not conspiracy theory?), nevertheless (I took two years of college chemistry so I know about things being possible or impossible physically) you must be able to get a firm yes or no on a suspect. Unfortunately, Mr. Ivins is dead and apparently his suicide might even help his family to get money. I like what George Washington said at his blog, about the FBI's history of bribing family members to get them to testify against their own (Ivins's son's price was going to be $2.5 million; his trash-talking brother - who I think wanted to compare him to Unabomber -- how much did he get?)

Anyway, I signed on for the defense of a dead man. If that is trolling, it is a pretty odd kind. I am a citizen of a Republic, and I smell not trolls but rats aplenty.