The Late Dr. Bruce Ivins: Not the Anthrax Suspect ?

A very sobering article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal suggests that the late government scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins, was not in fact "Dr Anthrax", despite the fact that he was believed to have committed suicide because the FBI was closing in on him as the chief suspect in the anthrax letter attacks that frightened the country in December 2001. In addition to making Dr. Ivins, who may or may not according to subsequent press accounts have been marginally but non-lethally loony, an Enemy of The State, the investigation, as the article states, does not appear to add up. Clearly, this also raises questions as to the identity of the actual perpetrators, and whether they are still At Large.

Paging "V for Vendetta", "The Matrix", Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, and all of those other sub-textual analyses of politics, totalitarianism, terror and reality. As the Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995 and the Unibomber showed, enemies of American democracy are homegrown as well as foreign. However, perhaps The Disjuncture in American Life, both subtle and profound, that the September 11, 2001 attacks represented, seemed to create a brief vacuum, a window of opportunity.

A Pandora's Box that creeped open with terror attacks on U.S. personnel and embassies for the past several decades, opened wide on 9/11, unleashing all manner of extremists. If the analyst's article is correct, what is most sobering and clear is that with the death of Dr. Ivins the anthrax killings may be far from over,

Wall Street Journal on the Dr. Bruce Ivins Story:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121789293570011775.html

Significant Terror Incidents: 1961-2003
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/pubs/fs/5902.htm