Glenn Greenwald comments on Salon.

It requires an extreme level of irrationality to read what happened to Hatfill and simultaneously to have faith that the "real anthrax attacker" has now been identified as a result of the FBI's wholly untested and uninvestigated case against Bruce Ivins. The parallels are so overwhelming as to be self-evident.

[...]

[...] the Obama administration is actively and aggressively blocking any efforts to investigate the FBI's case against Ivins through an Obama veto threat, based on the Orwellian, backward claim that such an investigation "would undermine public confidence" in the FBI's case "and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions."

[...]

As several people noted in comments, Obama's rationale for threatening to veto an anthrax investigation (investigations would undermine the State's credibility and thus dilute its authority) is very similar to the Catholic Church's explanation for why it concealed reports of so many abusive priests (disclosure would undermine the Church's credibility and thus dilute its authority).

New York Times report.

Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, "Absolutely not." At the Army's biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine worked, he said, "among the senior scientists, no one believes it."

Lawrence Sellin on UPI's Outside View.

Was Bruce Ivins the sole perpetrator of the anthrax mailings as the FBI claims or did his suicide result from the pressure of the investigation and the possible revelation of damaging personal information as occurred in the Hatfill case? Did Ivins, like Hatfill before him, simply fit the profile?

In the opinion of many, the Amerithrax investigation still appears far from conclusive.

From the Raw Story.

The White House is threatening to veto a key intelligence funding bill over what it considers to be a dangerous amount of oversight on covert agencies, according to published reports.

The 2010 Intelligence Budget has gone through a number of key changes over the past few months, with House Democrats and the Obama administration butting heads over a number of provisions. Key among them for the latest White House veto threat is a provision that would allow the Government Accountability Office to investigate intelligence agencies.

[...] In a letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees, Office of Management and Budget chief Peter Orszag highlighted several areas of the bill that have intelligence officials worried, including the GAO oversight provision.

{...] Strangely, Orszag additionally called out an effort to re-investigate the 2001 anthrax attacks, which have since been blamed on the deceased government scientist Bruce Ivins. An unnamed Obama administration official told Bloomberg News that if the 2010 Intelligence Budget demands another look at the FBI's conclusions, the bill would be vetoed.

Article by George Smith in the Register.

When the US government closed the anthrax case recently, the committee to clear Bruce Ivins and all the conspiracy theorists again emerged from the closet. Because the case took so long and the bioterrorist was at the center of the US biodefense research community, careers and reputations were made and lost on it.

Editorial in the New York Times.

The cumulative weight of the evidence seems persuasive. But the F.B.I. has a troubling history of building a circumstantial case against suspects who are later exonerated. We are inclined to agree with Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who is calling for an independent assessment to validate the findings. Americans need to be sure that the real culprit or possible accomplices are not still at large, waiting to do damage again. And we need to head off conspiracy theories that are apt to be fostered if the only judgment available comes from an agency eager to clear its books.

New York Times article.

Several hundred other scientists over the years have had access to the material in that particular flask, but according to the F.B.I., all of them except for Mr. Ivins were exonerated. Mr. Ivins committed suicide two years ago just as prosecutors were moving to indict him -- an act that seems, under the circumstances, to be highly incriminating.

And yet, when you look a bit closer at the F.B.I.'s report, doubts persist, and they lend a good deal of credibility to the arguments of those, including some of Mr. Ivins's former colleagues, that the F.B.I.'s case, as Representative Rush D. Holt of New Jersey put it last week, is "barely circumstantial."

From the Frederick News Post.

Jeffrey Adamovicz, former chief of bacteriology who supervised Ivins' work at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, said he found little new information in the FBI's final report.

"The evidence is still very circumstantial and unconvincing as a whole," Adamovicz wrote in an e-mail. "I'm curious as to why they closed the case while the (National Academy of Science) review is still ongoing. Is it because the review is going unfavorable for the FBI?"

Cryptome carries Meryl Nass's response to the FBI's closing of the Anthrax case. Her blog is here.

The FBI's report, documents and accompanying information (only pertaining to Ivins, not to the rest of the investigation) were released on Friday afternoon ... which means the FBI anticipated doubt and ridicule. The National Academies of Science (NAS) is several months away from issuing its $879,550 report on the microbial forensics, suggesting a) asking NAS to investigate the FBI's science was just a charade to placate Congress, and/or b) NAS' investigation might be uncovering things the FBI would prefer to bury, so FBI decided to preempt the NAS panel's report.

Times report.

The anthrax attacks that shocked America in 2001 were the work of a seriously disturbed government scientist who once called himself "Crazy Bruce" and who was obsessed with blindfolded women, according to the FBI's investigation's final report on the case.

Nineteen months after the suicide of Bruce Ivins, the biodefence researcher who was about to be charged with sending out a series of anthrax-laced letters that killed five people, the FBI has released new evidence that portrayed the 62-year-old scientist as psychologically fragile and apparently losing his grip on reality.