So lately people are all, “what’s up with anthrax?” I know there’s an awful lot to muddle through in these new anthrax findings, and I assume the first place you check for clarification is my site. When you want someone to muddle through complex stories for you, get the facts all wrong, and report back with a paranoid, lefty-slanted version of the truth, there is only one place to turn: jeffreydinsmore.com.

The basics are that this scientist, Dr. Bruce Ivins, committed suicide last week. Or say they say. After he killed himself, it came out that he was the primary suspect in the anthrax attacks that killed 5 people in 2001. Why was he the primary suspect? Because:

• He worked with anthrax at Fort Detrick, the US Government’s biological weapons research facility.
• He was known to have cleaned up anthrax that had spilled in the office.
• He killed himself.

And that’s about the extent of the actual evidence we’ve seen so far.

The next big piece of anti-Ivins news that you may have heard about is that his therapist (Jean Carol Duley) had a restraining order against him, because she believed him to be a “homicidal sociopath.” The restraining order was filed 5 days before he killed himself. You can read it on the Smoking Gun. According to reports, Duley claims to have received harassing phone calls from Ivins which prompted the restraining order.

A few things here: Jean Duley is the only one so far who has come forward with the belief that Ivins was a homicidal sociopath — a pretty enormous accusation to make against someone. Bruce Ivins worked at Ft. Detrick for 36 years. Does it take 36 years for our government to recognize that they have a homicidal maniac working in their bioweapons research department? And when it’s finally caught, is it plausible that it would be caught by … not a government psychiatrist, but a social worker who, as of July, 2007, was still finishing her degree?

In addition, Jean Duley is not necessarily the type of upstanding citizen whose words the media should reprint as gospel sans background check. (Note: the information about Jean Duley primarily comes from this article by Glenn Greenwald and this article by Larisa Alexandrovna.) She is currently on probation after a December 2007 DUI. She had another DUI in 2006 and yet another charge of reckless driving that same year. Granted, being an alcoholic and a bad driver is not proof that one is a bad social worker, but if Ms. Duley is being quoted as an expert on Ivins’s psychological profile, I would think her psychological profile should probably be given equal merit.

The other major weirdness in the case has to do with the initial 2001 attempts to tie the anthrax mailings to Iraq. If you’ll remember, the anthrax-laced letters were mailed with notes that read things like “Allah is great. You die now.” and “Death to America. Death to Israel.” Clearly, the work of Muslim terrorists, or so everyone assumed at the time. In the initial furor over where the letters were coming from, ABC News reported that they had learned from “four well placed and separate sources” that the anthrax was determined to contain a chemical known as bentonite, which was only produced in one country — Iraq. Bentonite, ABC News claimed, was a “trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program.”

That’s not the weird part. The weird part is that the tests finding traces of this Iraqi chemical in the anthrax were done at Fort Detrick.

So, to simplify: It is now suspected that the anthrax letters originated from Fort Detrick. In 2001, ABC News reported that, according to their sources, Fort Detrick determined that the anthrax came from Iraq. Ergo, the person (or people) who were responsible for the anthrax attacks were the same people who tried to pin it on Iraq.

There are two options here. #1, the obvious: Dr. Bruce Ivins was an evil genius who really, really wanted us to go to war with Iraq. He stole some anthrax from work, sent it out to a weirdly diverse group of people with letters making it seem like it came from Muslim terrorists, then contacted three fellow scientists to tell them an Iraqi-made chemical was found in the anthrax and somehow got them all to share this information with ABC News. 7 years later, he made harassing phone calls to the brilliant-yet-chronically drunk social worker who discovered that he had spent his entire life hiding his secret homicidal urges from his wife, his family, his friends, his coworkers, and his employer, the US Army. The social worker filed a restraining order against him, and 5 days later, he killed himself.

or

#2 - we are no closer to knowing the truth about this matter today than we were 7 years ago.

Bizarre Update: Apparently, Ivins was not just a homicidal maniac. He was also obsessed with sorority chicks:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The top suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks was obsessed with a sorority that sat less than 100 yards away from a New Jersey mailbox where the toxin-laced letters were sent, authorities said Monday.

Multiple U.S. officials told The Associated Press that former Army scientist Bruce Ivins was long obsessed with the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma, going back as far as his own college days at the University of Cincinnati.

The officials all spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

The bizarre link to the sorority may indirectly explain one of the biggest mysteries in the case: why the anthrax was mailed from Princeton, N.J., 195 miles from the Army biological weapons lab the anthrax is believed to have been smuggled out of.

But of course! Obviously, the reason why the anthrax letters were mailed from a mailbox in Princeton, NJ, was because a bioweapons specialist at Fort Detrick stuck them in a mailbox after driving 195 miles to hang out in front of a sorority! It all makes sense now! What more can we learn from this incisive report?

Katherine Breckinridge Graham, a Kappa alumna who serves as an adviser to the sorority’s Princeton chapter, said Monday she was interviewed by FBI agents “over the last couple of years” about the case. She said she could not provide any details about the interview because she signed an FBI nondisclosure form.

However, Graham said there was nothing to indicate that any of the sorority members had anything to do with Ivins.

“Nothing odd went on,” said Graham, an attorney.

“Nothing odd went on?!?” Didn’t we just hear from “multiple U.S. officials” that this guy was obsessed with sorority girls? So … what form did this obsession take, exactly? It must have been pretty weird if it’s called right out in the headline as an “obsession”.

Local police in both Princeton Borough and Princeton Township said Ivins’ name did not turn up on any incident reports or restraining orders.

O … kay. No incident reports? Not even a little, itty-bitty, “there’s some creepy guy hanging out in front of the house mailing letters?” I get it … it was a fun obsession! The kind that isn’t noticeable by anyone!

One more:

Kappa Kappa Gamma also has chapters at nearby colleges in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington. One official said investigators were working off the theory that Ivins chose to mail the letters from the Princeton chapter to confuse investigators if he ever were to emerge as a suspect in the case.

This is by far my favorite part of the article. At this point in the story, even though we haven’t seen a shred of proof, we’ve accepted the thesis that Ivins was obsessed with Kappa Kappa Gamma. Because what’s more fun than an anthrax-wielding pervert? The intrepid reporters recognize, though, that there’s one lingering question on everyone’s mind. Why would he mail his anthrax from so far away? Obviously, he had to mail his anthrax from a Kappa Kappa Gamma house, because that was his obsession, (just like, if I were to ever stick biochemicals in the mail, I’d definitely do it from the In and Out Burger), but aren’t there any KKG chapter closer to Fort Detrick?

Yes, the AP tells us, there certainly are. But Ivins was smart, see? He drove all the way to Princeton to confuse investigators. Because he knew someday they’d find out about his secret Kappa Kappa Gamma obsession and try to put two and two together, but would most likely give up when they found out the letters were mailed from Princeton, thinking, “well, he’s obsessed with this sorority, and the letters were mailed in front of this sorority, but it just doesn’t make sense that he would drive 195 miles to do so when he could have just gone to the Kappa Kappa Gamma down the street. You’re off the hook, Ivins!” Obviously.