What's interesting is these anthrax attacks were used at the time as one of the primary justifications for the invasion of Iraq, ABC News in particular reporting they had “four well-placed and separate sources” saying the anthrax had been analyzed at the Ft. Detrick facility (where Ivins worked) and found to contain the chemical additive Bentonite. Bentonite was generally reported to be an additive used exclusively by Iraq in the production of their chemical weapons.

This “Bentonite connection” was one of the justifications used by the administration to sell the invasion of Iraq to the Congress and the American people. The one problem is that it was later confirmed there was never any Bentonite found in any of the analyses conducted on any of the samples that were found.

This implies at least four people put together a political “dirty trick” by leaking information they knew to be false stating the anthrax attack was connected to Iraq through the presence of Bentonite, a connection they invented to sell a war that has led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

There are other odd twists to the story - journalists who have reported they were warned by “senior administration sources” of possible anthrax attacks prior to the attacks themselves and took these warnings seriously enough to go out and obtain the anthrax antidote Cipro - but if all of the government tests were negative on Bentonite, who were these four sources who fed this misinformation to ABC News?

If this was a dirty trick using an invented lie to lead us to war then there are four “sources” who need to be questioned about their statements. Not that they had any part in the anthrax attack itself, but did they use the attack to create a fiction that helped them lead us to war? I wonder about ABC News and their reaction to the fact they were set up and used by “four well-placed and separate sources” to lead us to war.

If you don't out them as sources - and I'm not yet clear in my own mind on their obligation, if they have one, of shielding them as sources - don't you at least put a team on the story and see what more might be found? Look for a little pay back? I don't think you want to live happily in a world where people set your news organization up, enlist you in the promotion of an indefensible war, and let that happen without consequences. I don't think. Unless they've got you totally by the balls.

August 3, 2008: An interesting discussion on protecting sources as well as additional (and disturbing) information is included in Glenn Greenwald's follow up to his August 1st entry.

August 6, 2008: The FBI has selectively released documents today in their Ivins case. Glenn Greenwald's coverage is excellent and the questions being raised leave you at a minimum with the thought the FBI, in its political gymnastics, has repeated its pattern of completely dropping the investigative-law enforcement ball.

August 8, 2008: “The watchdog press died under Bush....” Jay Rosen, current Professor of Journalism at NYU and former Chair of NYU's Journalism Department in a Glenn Greenwald Salon.com interview.

August 10, 2008: The “evidence” released by the FBI seems to contradict their statement that Ivins could have mailed the anthrax at the Princeton, N.J. mailbox. Again, I'd be curious to see if the mainstream media picks this up. Evidently the entire scientific community doesn't find the “scientific evidence” used by the FBI in justifying their findings to have any basis in fact. Not some of them, all of them.

I guess my question again is what is happening in the FBI? During my college years in the sixties the FBI had lost a lot of credibility and found it more difficult to recruit new members as it was fairly generally known that J. Edgar Hoover was not what his publicity machine wanted everyone to believe.

Similar things were happening at the CIA and it was having to go outside of their usual Ivy League recruiting territory to some of the state colleges where their reputation was still intact.

I still have to think the majority of the members of the FBI and the CIA are in a straight shooter get the bad guy mode and look at this cover your ass political side of their institutions with disgust. Will we hear from some of these people? I assume the culture is very much against whistle blowing no matter what so it's hard to know.

September 16, 2008: A depressing analysis of the Congressional questioning of FBI Director Robert Mueller on the Ivins - anthrax investigation today by Glenn Greenwald in Salon, depressing enough for the lack of progress in resolving the contradictions in the case, but more so for the overall health of the government and the oversight role that needs to be played by Congress.