Anthrax conspiracies

I haven't seen the government case against Ivins, but I gather there are a few thorny points: How did he get to the mailbox? Saying he obsessed about a sorority because he was rejected once in college doesn't magically transport him to its doorstep. Why would a Democrat be sending poison letters to Democratic senators?

NPR steps in here. Ivins was Catholic (horror!), his wife worked for a pro-life organization (how evil!), and he may have seen a letter that complained about the pro-abortion record of several of those senators (therefore he must have decided to kill them). I'm serious; I heard the story and that was their argument.

This is seriously creepy. Somebody at NPR has a hunger to link pro-life groups to murder, a hunger strong enough to overcome all proportion and logic (if Ivins was that upset about abortion senators, why was he still a Democrat?). It has the same smell of insanity as that coming from Egyptian TV, which made a serial out of Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Bias I can account for and deal with; madness I can't.

My guess? Access to the anthrax was probably so sloppy that shame and CYA tangled the investigations (which you'll have noticed have taken quite a long time). Agencies were afraid to admit how many people might have had access. Almost certainly few people did have access, but bad procedures would mean you really couldn't know for sure. And if sloppy procedures involved accounting, they might not be able to account for all samples or even know how many there were--and I'd bet the FBI would be willing to help keep it secret: it avoids panic and gives time to try to track down ambiguities and possibly mislaid material before other bad guys find it. (Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity.)

Of course, somebody meant murder; somebody who apparently didn't realize that the spores were small enough to fall through paper. Either he suffered remorse, or he shot his bolt (no more anthrax), or he died in the interim, since we haven't had any more attacks (and they'd be horrifyingly easy to do). Somebody with access or a friend of someone with access. Maybe Ivins. Maybe the janitor's girlfriend. The 9/11 link seems a little far fetched--there are far more efficient delivery means if you are using a suicide attacker.