"Dr. Ivins, who the Associated Press said had received three degrees, including a doctorate from the University of Cincinnati, appeared to have been a brilliant but deeply troubled man, according to a portrait emerging from legal documents and the recollections of friends and acquaintances.

"He was a church-going family man, and a dozen of his fellow parishioners gathered Friday morning to pray for him at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Frederick, where the Rev. Richard Murphy recalled him as "a quiet man ... always very helpful and pleasant," the A.P. said.

"But he was clearly in great mental anguish in recent weeks. Maryland court documents show he had been under psychiatric treatment and had been served with a restraining order directing him to stay away from a woman he was accused of stalking and threatening. And a lab colleague told the A.P. he was recently removed from his workplace by the police because of fears that he had become a danger to himself or others.

"Little more than a month ago, the Justice Department agreed to pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit by another biodefense researcher at the same facility, Steven J. Hatfill. The settlement ended a five-year legal battle over Dr. Hatfill's allegations that investigators violated his privacy by leaking information on the investigation to journalists.

"At the time, the Department of Justice emphatically denied any liability in connection with Dr. Hatfill's claims, despite agreeing to settle with him, and it was far from clear whether the suicide of Dr. Ivins might bring an end to the anthrax case” or point the way to further developments.

"The 2001 anthrax mailings were baffling in several ways, not least because the victims ” whether they were chosen or were struck at random” seemed to have nothing in common. The dead included an editor at a tabloid newspaper based in Florida, a woman in New York City, another woman in Connecticut, and two postal workers at a huge mail-sorting building in Washington, D.C.

"Targets of the mailings included Tom Brokaw of NBC and two Democratic senators: Tom Daschle of South Dakota, then his party's Senate leader, and Patrick J. Leahy, a leading member of the Senate Judiciary Committee but arguably not an instantly recognizable figure outside Washington and his home state."

"Much more important than the general attempt to link the anthrax to Islamic terrorists, there was a specific intent -- indispensably aided by ABC News -- to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. In my view, and I've written about this several times and in great detail to no avail, the role played by ABC News in this episode is the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade

"That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein.

"Bush's invocation of Iraq was the only reference in the State of the Union address to the unsolved anthrax attacks. And the Iraq-anthrax connection was explicitly made by the President at a time when, as we now know, he was already eagerly planning an attack on Iraq.

"ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and -- as importantly -- to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

"They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.

"One other fact to note here is how bizarrely inept the effort by the Bush DOJ to find the real attacker has been.

"See this important point from Atrios about Richard Cohen's admission that he was told before the anthrax attacks happened by a "high government official" to take cipro. Atrios write: "now that we know that the US gov't believes that anthrax came from the inside, shouldn't Cohen be a wee bit curious about what this warning was based on?"

"That applies to much of the Beltway class, including many well-connected journalists, who were quietly popping cipro back then because, like Cohen, they heard from Government sources that they should. Leave aside the ethical questions about the fact that these journalists kept those warnings to themselves. Wouldn't the most basic journalistic instincts lead them now -- in light of the claims by our Government that the attacks came from a Government scientist -- to wonder why and how their Government sources were warning about an anthrax attack? Then again, the most basic journalistic instincts would have lead ABC News to reveal who concocted and fed them the false "Saddam/anthrax" reports in the first place, and yet we still are forced to guess at those questions because ABC News continues to cover up the identity of the perpetrators."

The entire anthrax attack incidents smell to high heaven with the stink of probable Bush regime perpetration in its manic desire to create support for an invasion of Iraq for which it had planned and schemed long before March, 2003.