I'm hoping that becoming a therapist will not cause me to lose the ability to construct a syntactically correct sentence. "Either through poisoning", period? Apparently she was pretty rattled about having to file for a restraining order against her patient. Psychologically understandable, but linguistically reprehensible.

On the other hand, no one died. Primum non nocere.

What an odd way for a scientist to kill himself. By Tylenol poisoning. A low painful horrid death. You'd think a scientist would have the knowledge to take a much easier way out. I'd like to know who the therapist works for, hopefully not the US Government.

They certainly got it wrong on the Hatfill investigation and on the investigation of Dr. Assaad.

"The FBI's non-investigation of this heinous and sinister crime was a joke from the beginning: after all, since when do FBI probes have official names, and why such a silly one as "Amerithrax"? Such brazen corniness has about it an unmistakable Keystone Kops air, which was certainly evident throughout the long-playing media circus that will evermore be known as the persecution of Steven J. Hatfill.

Hatfill, you'll recall, is the long-suffering victim of this horror story, a bio-weapons expert and "insider" who was targeted as the culprit not only by the FBI and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, but also by dustbin Dylanologist A.J. Weberman, who, with characteristic restraint, accused him of being "the scumbag who killed several people in an attempt to awaken America to the dangers of biological warfare." This profile of the killer or killers as a "rogue insider" was also pushed by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biowar expert at the State University of New York at Purchase, who chairs the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Program of the Federation of American Scientists.

It was Rosenberg who became the mainstream media's expert-in-residence at the height of the anthrax scare, and, although she never named Hatfill, it was she who relentlessly pushed the "insider" thesis to the major news organizations, which settled on her detective story as the conventional wisdom. A story that turned out to be spectacularly, disastrously, and tragically wrong. Tragic, that is, from the perspective of poor Hatfill, who found himself vilified and hounded out of his job, deprived of his position in the community, and practically run out of human society by his relentless pursuers.

The Hatfill-haters' narrative went something like this: Senor Hatfill is a right-wing nut-case with dubious connections to South Africa's apartheid regime, and quite possibly a "bio-evangelist" (as Weberman put it) who might conceivably have planned the attacks to "warn" us of the dangers of biowar – by demonstrating, on a small scale, how terrorists might envelop a nation in a miasma of fear."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13090

I'm not going to be convinced they got the right guy, who just happened to conveniently off himself right in time and in a fashion that they could quickly declare the case closed. Just because he had some personality faults doesn't, by itself, make him the anthrax killer.

And one more thing, isn't a therapist required to report that a patient has tried to kill people. I think most states have updated their laws to require therapists to report such things. And why didn't she report that he was a killer when he told her, however many years ago that was.

She did report it, and every report I've read of Ivins's death said so. She had a restraining order taken out on him, after all.

While it appears that Hatfill was not the guy, it does seem to me that he was a reasonable suspect. If it was really Ivins, then it was indeed an insider. Ivins was one of the scientists asked to check the samples the FBI had, and that's about as inside as it gets.

Personally I trust no one, following the X-Files recommendation, so I don't believe fer sher that Ivins did it. Nor do I believe fer sher that Hatfill was not involved.

But I have to disagree with the statement about a painful death. He took a huge amount of Tylenol mixed with codeine. It's hard to imagine feeling pain, or anything at all, after that.

The real fly in the ointment for me are two things. The first reported by Atrios:
**************************************************
"In Cipro They Trusted

Glennzilla also reminds us of Richard Cohen:

The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.

Years later it apparently does not occur to American's Funniest Pundit to ask why a "high government official" was warning media figures to start popping Cipro in the aftermath of 9/11. I can see why, at the time, the obvious interpretation would be that there was intelligence about possible biological attacks. But 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?
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_07_27_archive.html#2210148635701974862
*******************************************
And Glenn Greenwald;s article:
During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."
*****************************************
I read what Sy Hersh said about Cheney's attitude about having one group of people, disguising themselves as Iranians, attacking one of our troop ships but ultimately dismissing it. I don't know that he'd have the same attitude towards ordinary citizens. He certainly didn't mind putting plenty of our own soldiers in harms way and keeping them there, and causing untold deaths to hundreds of thousands of people.

So until I see more concrete evidence other than one person's assertion that the guy had some issues with anger towards others and expressing himself as if her were going to do harm to that person, I'm not buying it. If he killed or tried to kill all these other people, who were they and where's the evidence of it?

I think it's still an unresolved question and we're jumping to conclusions if we take that slim evidence alone as proof that he was responsible for the anthrax attacks.

"When he feels that he’s been slighted or has had — especially toward women — he plots and actually tries to carry out revenge killings"

I might just - only just - buy that. But what kind of beef did he have with the people he supposedly poisoned with anthrax?

Glenn Greenwald's got even more today:

So much of the public reporting about Ivins has been devoted to depicting him as a highly unstable psychotic who had been issuing extremely violent threats and who had a violent past. But that depiction has been based almost exclusively on the uncorroborated claims of Jean Carol Duley, a social worker (not a psychiatrist or psychologist) who, as recently as last year, was apparently still in college at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland. Duley's scrawled handwritten complaint against Ivins, seeking a Protective Order, has served as the basis for much of the reporting regarding Ivins' mental state, yet it is hardly the model of a competent or authoritative professional. Quite the opposite.
Duley herself has a history that, at the very least, raises questions about her credibility. She has a rather lengthy involvement with the courts in Frederick, including two very recent convictions for driving under the influence -- one from 2007 and one from 2006 -- as well as a complaint filed against her for battery by her ex-husband. Here is Duley's record from the Maryland Judicial data base: [actual record in Greenwald's article].

ust three months ago, Duley pled guilty and was sentenced to probation (and fined $1,000), as a result of having been stopped in December, while driving at 1:35 a.m., and charged with driving under the influence:

On April 21, 2006, Duley was also charged with "driving a vehicle while impaired by alcohol," driving "while impaired by drugs or alcohol," and reckless driving, and on October 13, 2006, she pled guilty to the charge of reckless driving and was fined $580. Back in 1992, Duley was criminally charged with battery against what appeared to be her now-ex-husband (and she filed a complaint against him as well). Later that same year, she was criminally charged with possession of drug paraphenalia with intent to use, charges which appear to have been ultimately dismissed.
Prior to the restraining order against Ivins which Duley obtained two weeks ago, Ivins had no criminal record at all, at least not in Frederick. A story in today's Frederick News-Post quotes Duley's fiancee as claiming: "She had to quit her job and is now unable to work, and we have spent our savings on attorneys." But she doesn't appear to have used an attorney for her complaint against Ivins. If anything, her savings were likely depleted from attorneys' fees, court costs, and fines and probation for her various criminal proceedings (Larisa Alexandrovna has more details on Duley).
None of this is to defend Ivins, nor is to suggest that this constitutes evidence that Duley is lying or is otherwise inaccurate in her claims. As I said, it's perfectly possible that Ivins is guilty of being the anthrax attacker. I have no opinion on whether he is. The point is that nobody should have any opinion on that question -- one way or the other -- until they see the FBI's evidence.

Now that I think about it more with a little more reflection, the statement quoted reminds me of some therapists that I ran into before, during, and after the "children never lie" era. i.e. The McMartin preschool case days in which public defenders at the time did notice seem to coincide with a huge jump in sexual abuse allegations against adult men and children, quite often unfounded.

As they said during the X-files tv series (when I used to watch), the truth is out there.