They Instill Us With Confidence With Their Incompetence

When Digby's not kicking ass over at Hullabaloo, dday is. (Boldness from myself:)

First of all, this gaping hole in the case, the lack of any physical evidence putting Ivins at the crime scene, has been obvious from the moment the FBI closed the case. In fact, they're STILL looking for additional evidence, which should tell you something about how secure they are in their determination that Ivins acted alone. They're basing the entire case on the remote belief that Ivins checked out of his lab with just enough time to spare to drive 4 hours to Princeton for pretty much no reason and mail the letters. Except the postmark on the letters reflects the day after it would according to the FBI's own timeline. (The FBI doesn't even talk about the other letters mailed; presumably they have no evidence tying Ivins to those locations, either). And now this - the hair samples don't match. That's really only one of the many questions remaining in the case. The FBI has checked Ivins's car, his house, his locker, and his safety deposit box and found no traces of anthrax spores. The evidence of the particular strain of anthrax could have been in the hands of up to 100 people, and anyway the DNA testing does not point to any individual. There is just nothing in what the FBI has presented that is in any way conclusive - in fact, more pieces point AWAY from Ivins than toward him. Meryl Nass has the definitive rundown of the Swiss cheese-sized holes in the case.

Seven years, in perhaps the single most important case of unsolved domestic terrorism in US history, and we instead get something a tenth-grader would be loathe to turn in.

It really cannot be stressed enough how much the Bush Administration is insulting the American people, and how much contempt the FBI has for, well, pretty much the entire universe. They aren't even trying to hide at this point that the Ivins case is a massive cock-up because they know that Bush and AG Michael Mukasey won't do anything, that Congress won't do anything other than hold hearings to say "Hey guys, the FBI is up to something, let's get evidence" In which case Mukasey will say "We're conducting an investigation" and Bush will say "I cannot comment on this ongoing investigation" and they'll wait out the clock.

There is an incredible preponderance of evidence here that indicates the Ivins case is a complete sham and that the FBI either drove him to suicide or had a hand in his death to keep him quiet, and although the guy was strange, that doesn't make him a terror mastermind. Not even the right wingers in the Village Media are trumpeting this case, because even they have the good grace to remember that the anthrax scare was fed to them as propaganda to attack Iraq.

The government is complict, the media is complicit, Congress was complicit probably...and if everybody's guilty, who is going to expose the truth?