You know, I've often wondered if Tony Blair became a Catholic so he could go to confession. There's a lot more to David Kelly's story than we're ever going to find out. But officially, he's a suicide and no one's talking.

Let's review: The day after he died, a reporter asked Tony Blair, ”Have you got blood on your hands, prime minister?” Whether it was David Kelly's or all those killed in the Iraqi war, the answer seems to be yes, no matter how many judges rule otherwise.

Ah yes, Lord Hutton! One MP questioned the findings:

The MP reveals that the Oxfordshire coroner held an 'unusual' meeting with Home Office officials before he determined the cause of Dr Kelly's death.

And he claims that a 'cosy cabal' of Mr Blair's friends, including Peter Mandelson and Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, hand-picked Lord Hutton, a retired Law Lord from Northern Ireland, to lead the official investigation in 2003.

And then there's his relationship with Judith Miller. Remember?

There's so much more than we'll ever know - unless someone gets religion and decides to unburden their soul.

Weapons inspector David Kelly was writing a book exposing highly damaging government secrets before his ­mysterious death.

He was intending to reveal that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the ­British and American invasion.

He had several discussions with a publisher in Oxford and was seeking advice on how far he could go without breaking the law on secrets.

Following his death, his computers were seized and it is still not known if any rough draft was discovered by investigators and, if so, what happened to the material.

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MediaBloodhound: The Ivins anthrax case is yet another black eye for Network News

Martini Revolution: I wonder if all the rightwigers who give sole credit to Ronald Reagan with winning the Cold War will blame Bush and his epic failure of leadership in losing the post-Cold War? Now, John McCain wants to compound the blunder! If McCain's speech had been part of a college term paper, he'd have flunked.

EconoSpeak: Who are the Ossetians?

Corrente: We need Health Care, not Health Insurance

The Pump Handle: Anthrax is in the news but which bacteria should we fear?

How Appealing: Juror: "Hamdan didn't seem like an Al Qaida warrior."

I'd love for somebody to explain this one to me. I know he was working on the anthrax vaccine, but who nominated Ivins for this award? This item has not been picked up by the press like it should have. C&L's Mark Groubert tells me via email:

On March 14th, 2003 Bruce Ivins, the alleged anthrax killer and anthrax vaccine inventor, was awarded the highest civilian honor of the Pentagon by Army Secretary Thomas White. Exceptional Civilian Service Award

The LA Times:

At a Pentagon ceremony on March 14, 2003, Ivins and two colleagues from USAMRIID were bestowed the Decoration of Exceptional Civilian Service, the highest honor given to nonmilitary employees of the Defense Department. "Awards are nice," Ivins said in accepting the honor. "But the real satisfaction is knowing the vaccine is back on line.

As David Willman reports:

Bruce E. Ivins, the government biodefense scientist linked to the deadly anthrax mailings of 2001, stood to gain financially from massive federal spending in the fear-filled aftermath of those killings, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Ivins is listed as a co-inventor on two patents for a genetically engineered anthrax vaccine, federal records show. Separately, Ivins also is listed as a co-inventor on an application to patent an additive for various biodefense vaccines...read on

On April 26th, 2003, almost a month after White gave Ivins the award, the Army Secretary was fired by Donald Rumsfeld supposedly for this:

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Keith interviewed investigative journalist Gerald Posner last night, who did a great job of shattering all of the inconsistencies and improbabilities in the FBI's official case against alleged anthrax killer Bruce Ivins.

The strongest evidence they have going for them is also their Achilles‘ heel and that he‘s psychological profile. That fact that he‘s very unstable, that he was someone who was an alcoholic, that he might wanted to have the vaccine continue to go along, but that‘s also the fact that he could have been set up as a cutout or puppet or used by a group of people who wanted the anthrax out there.

They also knew about his weak psychological profile. How was he employed with the most secret biological warfare lab in the United States with this type of background that we now hear about? That they should have known about from day one. The Defense Department should hang its head in shame.

For even more on this story, see Glenn Greenwald's extensive coverage:

Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News

Additional key facts re: the anthrax investigation

Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation

The FBI's emerging, leaking case against Ivins

The FBI's selective release of documents in the anthrax case

Full transcript below the fold:

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Sic Semper Tyrannis: Col. Pat Lang is no wild-eyed leftie, but he's talking about a Bill of Impeachment.

Greg Palast: The McCain Plan: Homer Simpson without the donut

DCist: Anthrax case has some big holes in it.

The Largest Minority: Physicians for Human Rights has reported that Israel has been forcing sick Gazans to trade intelligence information about Hamas for medical treatment.

qwerty's qoncepts: What Lies Beneath

HOLY CRAP: Jews in "our churches"...Church-paid trips for White House aides...Better than 'Holy Underwear'?...Presidential campaign religious smear...God made her a "Cultural Warrior"...Without a prayer...'Christian' gossip...Religious Right nixes Romney...Another moron has found Jesus on yet another piece of junk food...Creationists ignore evidence...Catholic calls for Catholic VP....The Godly career of Jesse Helms...BUSHCO says religious beliefs trump human health...

This whole story concocted by the FBI smells really, really bad. Are we supposed to believe this yarn? I'll try to do a bunch of posts on this because it is a completely insane story. Did it really take seven years for the FBI to finally catch Bruce Ivins, a scientist who was working with anthrax and then helping the FBI to finger Steven J. Hatfill---who just so happens was wrongly accused and smeared until he happened to fight back?

June 27: The federal government awards Hatfill $5.8 million to settle his violation of privacy lawsuit against the Justice Department.

Have you ever seen a huge settlement like that right before they catch the real killer?

Did you watch the press conference yesterday? It absolutely made no sense. The feebs made it sound like there were millions of people that could have had access to anthrax. When they were asked why it took so many years to come up with Army scientist Bruce Ivins---they looked to the universe.

Q:When did you get around to him as a suspect from March 31st in 2005?

A: It's important to remember how complex and complicated this investigation was. At the outset we had to identify the universe of persons and labs that might have access to this type of anthrax. Once we identified what type of anthrax it was, then over the years there were efforts to shrink the size of the pool...

What the hell is he talking about? I'd say the FBI was drowning in a pool of lies. Are there 8 million people and labs to check out to see who actually had anthrax? I want to see the FBI logs on this case. The day to day activity. Really, there needs to be a full investigation of this. How many hours did they spend on this case? What did they know and when did they know it? Ivins was actually helping the FBI with their own case! It's right out a serial killer novel. I'll have more later. There are so many layers to this story.

Read this NY Times story for some information...

Emptywheel has a good time line.

And Glenn Greenwald is on top of it too.

The Brad Blog: Open season on liberals continues. It was always more important to link the attacks to Islamic terrorists than look for the truth. Consider: Anthrax attacks = Patriot Act. There are still a lot of questions and too many easy answers around this matter.

Happy Valley News Hour: Monica Goodling's Super-Secret Guide to interviewing potential job applicants.

Truthdig: BUSHCO stonewalling congress on sexual assault in the military

Vox Verax: The conservative juggernaut is cracking up

Economist's View: It was the Republicans who called for a "change" in the face on our currency, and they aren't kidding.

In his State of the Union address last night, Bush boasted, “We are grateful that there has not been another attack on our soil since 9/11.”

Except, of course, that’s wrong. I’m not trying to play a cute semantics game; I know what conservatives mean when they talk about “terrorist attacks.” They’re describing devastating, cataclysmic events that kill a lot of people at once. I get it.

But about a month after 9/11, someone sent weaponized anthrax to two Democratic senators and several news outlets. Five Americans were killed and 17 more suffered serious illnesses. For reasons that I’ve never been able to explain, the incident — it’s entirely reasonable to call it an “attack” — is hardly ever mentioned. No one knows where the anthrax came from, who sent it, or why. It was a horrifying incident, immediately on the heels of another horrifying incident, but more than six years later, it’s almost as if the episode never happened.

After Yglesias noted that it seems as if the “whole episode has been officially erased from the historical record or something,” Atrios added:

And anthrax was what made things like “mobile chemical weapons labs” sound so scary. Not everyone agrees, but I think more than 9/11 the anthrax freaked the country out. 9/11 was horrible, but the anthrax made it seem like we’d reached a new era where some horrible creepy shit was going to happen every day.

And then it was all forgotten.

Quite right. Every time I hear someone talk about the absence of 9/11 attacks, I twitch, wondering why the anthrax incident has somehow been downgraded in the national memory.

When I was a kid, my class would have to write cards to soldiers in Vietnam during the holidays, our teachers reminding us that these men and women were far from home and all the comforts of the holidays. I remember hearing how much it meant to the troops to get these little packages with childish scrawls and pictures, along with the socks and chocolate and other treats we would send along to bring them a little bit of home in the Vietnamese jungle. Maybe that's why this seems so simultaneously poignant and pathetic.

Hundreds of thousands of holiday cards and letters thanking wounded American troops for their sacrifice and wishing them well never reach their destination. They are returned to sender or thrown away unopened.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax scare, the Pentagon and the Postal Service have refused to deliver mail addressed simply to "Any Wounded Soldier" for fear terrorists or opponents of the war might send toxic substances or demoralizing messages.[..]

USO spokesman John Hanson said that like the military, the nonprofit service organization does not deliver unopened mail to unspecified recipients. He said the USO worries about security as well as hateful messages from war critics.

"We just want to make sure it's not, `Die, baby killer,'" he said. "There are people out there who act irrationally, and we don't want anyone to get a message that would be discouraging."

That's right...you can put your life on the line, but we think you're too delicate for bad words on a card...as if people who are against the war are calling the troops baby killers. It's a disgusting slur on both the troops and those of us who want them out of harm's way.

  Reuters:

A portion of a sixth-floor ABC News office housing "Good Morning America" was closed down for five hours Friday afternoon after an employee found a letter containing an unidentified white powder.

A portion of a floor in the building at 147 Columbus Ave. was shut down after 1 p.m. when the unnamed employee found the letter. Addressed to "Good Morning America" weatherman Sam Champion, the letter mentioned anthrax.[..]

ABC News said police were questioning a "person of interest" in connection with the case. The news organization said that "Good Morning America" operations would resume Friday and continue throughout the weekend. Even though tests for anthrax came back negative, the area would be thoroughly cleaned.

Although there was some discussion that Champion as to why was targeted, a former studio temp admitted to sending the letter and is being questioned.