Anthrax: just too neat

Damned Olympics sucking me in! So much to catch up on.

The suicide of Army scientist Bruce Ivins just as the FBI seemed to be closing in on him as the prime suspect in the anthrax letters case strikes me as just too neat and clean to be completely credible. I know, Occam's Razor, simplest-explanation-best and all that. But even with all the stuff they released about Ivins being pretty mentally unstable, I'm not completely convinced. I'm not sure I go all the way with this writer who suggests the Bush-Cheney cabal staged it, but I do remember how helpful the anthrax letters were to creating the impression that it might have been Saddam Hussein, which the Bushies were pushing as hard as they could -- and which contributed to the psychological build-up to the Iraq war -- until the FBI seemed to settle unjustly on Stephen Hatfill, who ended up getting $5.8 million from the taxpayers for all the harassment to which he was subjected.

The best on this issue has been Glenn Greenwald, who has pursued various inconsistencies in the case against Ivins, here, here, here, and here. Very lawyerly, which in this case and context is a compliment. But even the WSJ has run pieces (by a former Ft. Detrick scientist who worked with him) saying that it just couldn't have been Ivins, and probably not any single individual.

Full-scale congressional investigation, anyone?