I added you to MercRising's blogroll as my way of saying, "Well done!"

--Charles

Cassandra, based on these past few LJ entries you seem positively spooked. Yahoo is a website and thus has the luxury of editing breaking news stories - your entries point directly at a "WEIRD" conspiracy going on, but I do not see it.

After looking at both articles you've linked to, I've decided to pull out excerpts that indicate why the FBI would see Ivins as a person of interest:

"He conducted unauthorized testing for anthrax spores outside containment areas at the infectious disease research unit where he worked, according to an internal report."

"He had in his mind that he was omnipotent." (according to brother)

"The family's home is 198 miles -- about a 3 1/2 -hour drive -- from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., where anthrax spores were found by investigators.
All of the recovered anthrax letters were postmarked in that vicinity."

"Maryland court documents show he recently received psychiatric treatment and was ordered to stay away from a woman he was accused of stalking and threatening to kill."

""Client has a history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, plans and actions towards therapist," Duley said, adding that his psychiatrist had described him as homicidal and sociopathic."

I don't think these bits of evidence point the finger at Ivins, but they do warrant an investigation, especially if there are no other leads. I'm just as confused as you are over the idea that he would test his cure by infecting innocent people through the mail (where does the cure come in that scheme?). The motives behind his suicide are unclear, as well - was he hounded and framed to the point that he'd rather die than be executed and have his name dragged through the mud? Was his emotional state pushed to the brink by being under scrutiny, period? Was it the soaring legal costs?

These are all questions that need answering for this story to make sense beyond "suspect kills self," but I think it's fair for the FBI to investigate him, and for Yahoo to take advantage of the ability to insta-edit, even to REMOVE information. If they had edited out information about his household pets, would that mean he experimented on them before mailing out anthrax?

One thing will be made crystal clear soon, though - if the FBI closes the case on the anthrax attacks, it will mean they focused all of their energies like a magnifying glass on a man who didn't deserve to take that much heat.

The timestamp on the story keeps updating, that's the only indicator I see that the story's evolving.

The Daily Gamecock used AP stories, too. They're still open to editing, though Yahoo's standard seems to be different from USC's (when I used to edit, anyways). Here's the AP link: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ANTHRAX_SCIENTIST?SITE=MITRA&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

While the AP writers are cited on Yahoo's page too, there could still be an online editor adding bits as he sees fit. I don't know Yahoo's standards on that sort of thing, but it's nothing I would consider "standard."

Trocke, "unauthorized testing for anthrax spores outside containment areas" is not necessarily a suspicious act. First, if he wanted to do unauthorized testing, he probably could have and would have done so inside the containment areas. But the culture of spores for this attack was almost certainly done off-site. Unauthorized testing for spores sounds like he suspected a spill but didn't want to take it to management without being sure.

Within driving distance of that mailbox in Princeton lives something like half the nation's population. Granted, not many of them have training in microbiology, but a lot do.

And ask yourself this: if he had such serious psychiatric problems, how did he pass the background check needed to work in a secure facility? Psychiatric problems are the easiest sort of thing to concoct when one wants to smear someone, because so many people have had some need for counseling.

I have no opinion on whether Ivins was or was not involved in the anthrax attacks. But I know bulls--t when I see it, and this reporting is full of it.

--Charles

I agree that several details in the Yahoo story (all versions) don't need to be present, especially in a breaking news story. The edits are odd, too, so I definitely think some of the press is either fishy or plain lazy. This follow-up story seems to fill in a few blanks better, though there are still questions of "how did he get security clearance for so long?" and "how come the FBI can't investigate two people at once?"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080803/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/anthrax_scientist