Monday 4 August 2008

It gets better [Anthrax 3]

So our alleged, post-mortem-all-but-convicted anthrax-dust-scatterer, Bruce Ivins, whom I perhaps prematurely dissed as a likely terrorist a couple days ago, now turns out to have quite a few defenders. But more to the point, his main accuser turns out to be, shall we say, less than entirely credible.

Jean C. Duley, the shrink who was quoted in AP as having sought protection from a supposedly crazed Ivins (raising all sorts of questions about personnel screening at Fort Detrick), turns out to have once faced a domestic assault charge for beating up her husband and to have stood trial for a DUI as recently as 2006. This is the government’s and the media’s star witness on Ivins’ state of mind? Based on whose testimony one and all rush to declare ‘case closed’? After paying out $6 million to the last guy they slandered for being the anthrax murderer since he, unfortunately for them perhaps, remains quite alive?

But let’s get back to Duley who directed a substance abuse program in Frederick, Maryland, even though her DUI trial had occurred two years before. She claims in her request for a restraining order against Ivins, to have been known that he was going to be indicted for five counts of murder—even though her grand jury appearance was scheduled for a week later, August 1. How would she know that? Did the FBI tell her?

Then it turns out that Duley isn’t a psychologist but a social worker and is currently pursuing her studies at tiny Hood College in Frederick. Good for her, but this is the ‘expert’ on whose diagnosis we rely to declare Ivins guilty and sweep one of the key building blocks in the decision to go to war in Iraq permanently under the rug?

This whole episode stinks worse than a soggy bag of catfish heads. Seven years ago newspapers and TV heavy breathers insisted that the entire nation was in dire threat from invisible spores floated into our space by Saddam Hussein, war-panic was successfully induced and we all know the rest.

The anthrax scare fit the plans for war perfectly. Why the big rush to bury the story of what really happened based on such flimsy evidence from such dubious sources?

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