I Bet He was a Closet Teabagger!
Isn’t this interesting:
The Strange World Of Dr. Anthrax
After the Department of Justice last month formally closed its probe of the 2001 anthrax attacks, the FBI released the first batch of documents detailing the years-long investigation that ended with officials concluding that Bruce Ivins, a government scientist who committed suicide in July 2008, was responsible for the mailings that killed five victims. The records, released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests, portray Ivins as becoming increasingly unhinged as it became clear that he was the principal target of the FBI’s “Amerithrax” probe. Additionally, the memos–a selection of which you’ll find on the following pages–reveal how agents examined every aspect of Ivins’s life, monitored his e-mails, searched his trash, and were even surveilling his Maryland home at the exact time he was inside overdosing. Despite being an FBI target, Ivins was often forthcoming about the details of his strange obsessions and private life. For example, as seen below, when agents executed search warrants in late-2007, an FBI supervisor asked Ivins if he was worried about those raids. Ivins said he was, noting that he did things a “middle age man should not do,” adding that his actions would “not be acceptable to most people.” He then noted that agents searching his basement would find a “bag of material that he uses to ‘cross-dress,'” according to an interview report.
And:
Ivins wrote that “Dick Cheney scares me. The Patriot Act is so unconstitutional it’s not even funny.” He added, “I’m voting for Obama!”
Yup, another member of “the Base!” I can’t wait for the New York Times’ Paul Krugman to opine!
UPDATE: Reader “el coronado” comments:
what’s most interesting to me about the FBI “closure” of the matter by blaming everyhting on the dead guy, ivins – dead men can’t defend themselves, and besides, he was an odd duck – is the timing of that annoucement. teh WSJ published a devastating obliteration of the FBI’s “case” against ivins on 25 january of this year, written by edward jay epstein. here are the huglughts:
1) the anthrax in question waa aerosolized by means of attaching the spores to silicon, “according to the US armed forces institute of pathology. (…) if so, then somehow silicon was *added* [my emph.] to the anthrax. but ivins, no matter how weird he may have been, ***had neither the set of skills nor the means*** to attach silicon to anthrax spores.” {again, my emph.]
2) “at a minimum, such a process would require highly specialized equipment that did not exist anywhere in ivins’s lab – or, for that matter, anywhere at (where he worked).”
3) the FBI was oddly releuctant to inform congress of the precise percentage of silicon contained in the anthrax used in the attacks. this was apparantly because…
4) (finally) “according to the FBI lab, 1.4% of the powder in the leahy letter was silicon. ‘this is a shcokingly high proportion’, explained stuart jacobson, an expert in small particle chemistry.’it is a number one would expect from a deliberate weaponization of anthrax.'”
5) the FBI stuck to their story: hadda be ivins. maybe he did it at home! so, “to back up their theory, the FBI contacted scientists at the lawrence livermore national labs to conduct experiments in which anthrax is accidentally absorbed from a media heavily laced with silicon. [the results of those tests) effectively blew the FBI’s theory out of the water. the livermore scientists had tried 56 times to replicate the high silicon content without any success. (…) they never came close. most results were an *order of magnitude lower* [me again] with some as low as .001%.(!)”
6) therefore, “since ivins had neither the equipment or skills to weaponize anthrax with silicon, the some other party MUST HAVE done it.”the FBI later responded in a WSJ letter to the editor in which they argued, paraphrased, “huh-UHHH!!!!”. they offered no other details.
and now, a mere month later, the “case” is “closed”. so who do we believe here? a large federal bureaucracy well-known for its belief that maintaining its image supercedes all other priorities, including “truth” and “law enforcement”? or a man respected worldwide as a meticulous and accurate researcher? and if you choose to believe the FBI is lying, as i do, for whatever reason, what else might they have lied about? hm…..think, think…..coughhoriuchicough….
Interesting . . .
As commenter “TheSiliconGraybeard” notes,
There seems to be an attitude that shows up in law enforcement, something along the lines of “we got somebody for it”. It sometimes doesn’t seem quite so important that they got the right somebody, just that they got a warm body arrested and/or jailed.
I’ve noted that in this blog. We don’t have a “justice” system, we have a legal system, and the metric seems to be “did we get a conviction or at least close the case?” So if the WSJ is correct, it would appear that the FBI hounded a not-very-stable man into suicide, and then said “HE DID IT!”
I guess it MUST’VE been one of us “cultists!”