Ivins wouldn't have had to drop the letters in a mailbox. He might have left them in someone else's mailbox, a private mailbox, before 4-5 PM, AFTER their mail had been delivered...then the mail carrier would have picked the mail up the next day, marking it a day later. Ivins could have left it there in the middle of the afternoon.

There are all sorts of ways Ivins MIGHT be the anthrax killer, but none that have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Why Ivins killed himself is the real mystery.

If he did.

The MSM as stenographer for the government -- and the stigma attached to questioning the government -- is a partisan phenomenon. The truth is that the MSM is scared of screeching right-wingers.

I heard what may be an apocryphal story about Karen Hughes at the 2004 Republican Convention. She was watching CNN on a monitor under the podium, and heard an on-air person say that there were people booing (or something). She felt this was wrong (it wasn't), and she tore out of her war-room and charged into the CNN booth and started yelling and cursing. (Maybe one of my fellow-commenters has a link?)

I sincerely doubt that David Brooks or David Broder or Maureen Dowd or any of our MSM "reporters" will feel obliged to take the word of a Democratic administration. On the contrary, they will obsess over the administrations numerous lies, scandals and missteps just as they have in the past.

Our society's problems are much more severe and hard-to-remedy than most of us really realize. We've dug ourselves a mighty hole from which there may well be no exit.

Thanks for bringing up the case/mystery of Aafia Siddiqui. The Pakistani and Middle East media have been all over this story, yet a woman being charged in New York with what appears to be questionable charges and inadequate medical care, until the judge ordered it, is pretty much ignored by our M$M. Ondelette has written excellent articles about this in Open Salon (see sig) and the blog Humanity Against Crimes. It, like the Ivins case, clearly needs more investigation so the truth can be found and justice can be served.

http://humanityagainstcrimes.blogspot.com/

http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=9029

but why it was made. The factlet was caught because CNN edited their story literally as it was being read -- from specific information (4-5pm) to more general information ("late afternoon"). This is not the first time that a "news" outlet has gone back into a story to unclarify it. The New York Times did that as well on another related story and that was caught by a poster at OpEdNews as well as by BradBlog.

What they did was show us exactly what to look at, right?

What drives me crazy is just calling something a conspiracy theory, automatically dismisses an entire argument.

1) As rigorous intuition likes to say: It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a coincidence theory. All those coincidences...what do we do with them?

2) I don't think all the evidence piled up in each of these 'conspiracy' theories bothers the powers that be naught. Not a bit. They like when enough evidence comes to light to keep the intelligent sheep nervous enough to know what's going on--but not enough to act on it.

Posting a blog or comment isn't the same as starting an armed revolution. Nowhere near. And that is exactly what is needed at this point--an armed revolution. Or would that be too "Mexico" for most Americans...?

For the sake of argument, let's assume that Ivins was a perpetrator. What is the FBI's argument that he was the perpetrator, i.e. that he acted alone? Quite possibly I've missed something, but I haven't seen the FBI say anything at all to even make this even seem more likely than not. Given the complexity of the task, the mailings, etc., it would seem the simpler and more natural hypothesis would be that he had at least one accomplice (again assuming Ivins was involved). There are plenty of holes in the FBI's evidence against Ivins and appropriate concerns about selective disclosure, but is there any (public) evidence at all that he acted alone?

(BTW, thanks Glenn for noting that Apuzzo was the author of the AP piece. Accountability is a good thing. Kind of bad on the part of the International Herald Tribune to run a piece without the byline. It looks like that's their standard practice for AP pieces.)

Not sure if I posted this to you before, but it is on my blog -- about the epidemic of sudden -- and generally violent -- death in the bioweapons research community after 9-11 in the five months between November 2001 and March 2002 -- the story was posted on Free Republic on May 4, 2002 and was reprinted from an article in Canada's Globe and Mail -- most of it is on my blog -- this is edited down to the summary

Scientists' deaths are under the microscope

The Globe and Mail | Saturday, May 4, 2002 | ALANNA MITCHELL

"It's a tale only the best conspiracy theorist could dream up.

"Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months. Some of them world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues. Others the best in figuring out how to stop millions from dying because of biological weapons. Still others, experts in the theory of bioterrorism."

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The article gave story and explanations in depth here, but for right now, we can cut to their summary:

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"The sudden and suspicious deaths of 11 of the world's leading microbiologists."

Who they were:

1. Nov. 12, 2001:

Benito Que was said to have been beaten in a Miami parking lot and died later.

2. Nov. 16, 2001:

Don C. Wiley went missing. Was found Dec. 20. Investigators said he got dizzy on a Memphis bridge and fell to his death in a river.

3. Nov. 21, 2001:

Vladimir Pasechnik, former high-level Russian microbiologist who defected in 1989 to the U.K. apparently died from a stroke.

4. Dec. 10, 2001:

Robert M. Schwartz was stabbed to death in Leesberg, Va. Three Satanists have been arrested.

5. Dec. 14, 2001:

Nguyen Van Set died in an airlock filled with nitrogen in his lab in Geelong, Australia.

6. Feb. 9, 2002:

Victor Korshunov had his head bashed in near his home in Moscow.

7. Feb. 14, 2002:

Ian Langford was found partially naked and wedged under a chair in Norwich, England.

8. 9. Feb. 28, 2002:

San Francisco resident Tanya Holzmayer was killed by a microbiologist colleague, Guyang Huang, who shot her as she took delivery of a pizza and then apparently shot himself.

10. March 24, 2002:

David Wynn-Williams died in a road accident near his home in Cambridge, England.

11. March 25, 2002:

Steven Mostow of the Colorado Health Sciences Centre, killed in a plane he was flying near Denver.

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Kind of speaks for itself, does it not?

Except to add that old line from the Second City skits:

"WOWEE -- PRETTY SCARY, HUH, KIDS?"