Well, excuse us. If you don't mind, we still have a few questions:

-- Was Ivins, as Marcy and Glenn Greenwald have wondered, a conscious part of the disinformation campaign to convince Congress and the public to go to war with Iraq?

-- Did Ivins -- if he really was the anthrax killer -- have any co-conspirators, as the evidence suggests?

-- Why was security at Fort Detrick, home of USAMRIID, probably the nation's most sensitive and secretive weapons laboratory, so lax as to allow this to happen?

-- And finally (and perhaps most significantly), was the mere fact of this kind of weaponized anthrax's existence at Fort Detrick another example of the Bush administration's flagrant violations of international law?

You see, the process used to create this anthrax was in flagrant violation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (more here). The United States is not just a cosigner, it is one of the chief authors of this particular international law, which has been in effect since 1972. Chief among its tenets is the prohibition against developing new biological-weapons processes.

The FBI's self-evident conclusion that the anthrax was produced at Fort Detrick is manifest evidence that we are violating that law -- and have probably been doing so for some time, even preceding the Bush regime.

Indeed, we've known since this spring that the anthrax was almost certainly produced there, when a Fox News report on a possible breakthrough in the case disclosed that "scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues."

So you'll have to excuse us if we are not quite ready to move along. In fact, as Jane says, it's time for a full-blown, front-page congressional investigation.

That same Fox News story, incidentally, reported that there were four suspects in the anthrax case at the time. Now that the deed has been laid at Ivins' feet, does that mean the other three have been cleared? Judging from the FBI's treatment of the matter, it certainly seems so.

And yet for each door that officials want to close with Ivins' convenient suicide, four others seem to open. Moreover, as the New York Times observed this morning, there is still by no means any conclusive evidence that it was in fact Ivins -- nor even that he acted alone.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the anthrax case is the one that emerges from the larger picture that has been taking shape in the years since the attacks: It is now perfectly clear that the attacks were used by the Bush administration to drum up public fearfulness to advance the "War on Terror" as a marketing device for a whole panoply of measures and policies, from the Patriot Act to the invasion of Iraq.

And yet the perpetrator of those attacks, it turns out, was a scientist on the administration's payroll. There is of course no evidence connecting Ivins with the BushCo "terra" marketing team beyond this coincidence, but this simple fact itself is reason enough for a full investigation.

Observe, as Blue Texan has, that the objects of the attacks were Democratic congressional leaders (Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy) and a major "liberal media" figure, Tom Brokaw of NBC. Perhaps it was only a coincidence that congressional Democrats and the media were going to be the Bush administration's chief obstacles in passing its initiatives under the rubric of the "war on terror".

Perhaps Ivins (or whoever the perpetrator was) actually saw this political reality and chose his targets out of an ideological desire to help the administration. Or perhaps he just wanted more funding for his particular line of research. But we won't know until there is a proper investigation.

One thing we do know: Once it became apparent that the phony theory that the anthrax contained bentonite -- which was how the attacks were originally connected to Iraq -- would not hold water, it was also clear that this was a case of pure domestic terrorism, and very likely right-wing terrorism at that. And it was at this point that all interest in solving the case, both on an official level and within the media, evaporated.

It's also now painfully clear that the attacks had their desired effect. Congressional Democrats in fact caved, and have continued to cave, every time the White House has waved the bloody, anthrax-stained "terra" shirt.

Likewise, so have the media -- witness their complicit role, as Greenwald has explored in some detail, in purveying the bentonite hoax. And of course, the right-wing bigotsphere has never given up on it; Michelle Malkin has continued to tout the theory as recently as this year -- though she has been impressively silent about Ivins.

Meanwhile, we dirty fucking hippies, who have been consistently right about this case, have again gone consistently ignored. (If you want an example of eerie prescience which actually was just very good, thorough, and well-informed analysis, check out Paul deArmond's 2002 paper on the matter.)

At the end of the day, what we're looking at is a Bush clusterfuck of historic proportions: an intensely important weapons program where security is criminally lax; an administration so intensely politicized that it is willing to seize upon terrorist attacks against their political enemies as a club for obtaining their agenda -- potentially through collusion with the terrorist; an administration similarly willing to flout the fundamental tenets of international law; while the actual perpetrator remains scot-free and is only finally revealed by his own continuing miscreancy.

If that doesn't bear investigation, nothing does.

Anthrax suspect's colleague 'really, really' doubts his guilt

David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Monday August 4, 2008

In the wake of the apparent suicide of government scientist Bruce Ivins, the FBI is preparing to declare the anthrax case closed, even though, as the New York Times reports, the evidence against Ivins was largely circumstantial.

Genetic analysis has identified a flash in Ivins' laboratory at Fort Detrick as the source of the anthrax used in the attack, and the envelopes used to mail the anthrax were purchased at a nearby post office. However, the Times notes that at least ten people had access to the flash in question, and the FBI has never found evidence that Ivins was in New Jersey on the dates when the letters were mailed.

According to the Washington Post, "Knowledgeable officials asserted that Ivins had the skills and access to equipment needed to turn anthrax bacteria into an ultra-fine powder that could be used as a lethal weapon. Court documents and tapes also reveal a therapist's deep concern that Ivins, 62, was homicidal and obsessed with the notion of revenge."

However, colleagues of Ivins told the Post that Fort Detrick was not equipped to create weaponized anthrax, with one explaining, "USAMRIID doesn't deal with powdered anthrax. ... I don't think there's anyone there who would have the foggiest idea how to do it. You would need to have the opportunity, the capability and the motivation, and he didn't possess any of those."

Anthrax expert Dr. Meryl Nass has also cast doubt on whether Ivins had either the expertise needed to produce weaponized anthrax or access to a large enough supply of spores for the volume of anthrax used in the attacks.

The claim that Ivins was homicidal has come from just one source, social worker Jean Carol Duley, who alleges that he "has actually attempted to murder several other people. ... He is a revenge killer." No one else has yet come forward to back Duley up, and her own credibility is now under attack, with both RAW STORY's Larisa Alexandrovna and Salon's Glenn Greenwald pointing out that Duley only received her degree in social work a year ago and has a history of DUI and other convictions.

NBC News reports that Ivins was well-liked in the community of Frederick, MD, where Fort Detrick is located. He played in a church band and volunteered at the local Red Cross. Neighbors told NBC they trusted Ivins and considered him "really safe."

NBC's Meredith Vieira spoke to Dr. Russell Byrne, who had been both a colleague and a friend of Ivins for 15 years. Sounding distraught, Byrne said he was "still trying to process a lot of information. It's come in really quickly. A lot of it is just consternation at the ridiculous motives they're attributing."

The other motive that has been suggested for why Ivins might have mailed out anthrax is that he could have been hoping to profit from his participation in work at Fort Detrick on an anthrax vaccine. However, Byrne found that unlikely, explaining that the government owns the patent on the vaccine and that Ivins himself was only one of several researchers, so there could have been no more than "small monetary incentives."

Byrne further found it unlikely that Ivins would have been able to transform the anthrax spores into a powdered form at the laboratory without him knowing. "I was the division chief, and I didn't know that anybody did that," he stated. "All of the challenges that we did with animals were with wet spores. ... The dry spores I wasn't aware of."

Byrne said he hadn't recently been working in the same lab as Ivins, but people who were told him him that "changes really began to accelerate in the last year. ... He would sit at his desk weeping. He really couldn't do his work any more because the pressure was tremendous."

Byrne has told the press he believes Ivins was hounded by the FBI, and Ivins' lawyer has blamed FBI harassment for Ivins' suicide. "I think he committed suicide when he was walked out of the building, escorted by law enforcement officials," Byrne told Vieira. "That meant the end of his career."

Ivins was sent for psychiatric evaluation on July 10, because of his "deteriorating emotional condition," and was barred from returning to the base. Until then, he had maintain his full security clearance and continued to take part in sensitive research and discussions.

Byrne concluded, in reference to Duley's allegations, "It's possible that somebody could hide that [violent side] from all of your co-workers and nobody would ever hear about it, but I really, really doubt it."

This video is from NBC's Today Show, broadcast August 4, 2008.