Given its previous bungling, can anyone believe the FBI's claim to have solved the 2001 anthrax mystery?
When confronted with anthrax-laced letters that misspell the world's best known antibiotic as "penacilin" (rather than penicilin), who immediately suspects highly-trained scientists? Enter the Keystone Cops in their latest manifestation, the FBI: busy trying to wrap up the deadly 2001 anthrax case by fingering someone it had already driven to suicide.
One would have thought that the certainty of the FBI's investigators in this new posthumous revelation might have been dented by wake of a $5.8m damages award to the previous quarry of the Bureau for the anthrax cases, Steven Hatfill. But it seems unblushing in its attachment to its own omniscience.
Sometimes incompetence is so spectacular it looks like a conspiracy. Since its manifest Clouseau-like failures with the big one – the attack on the World Trade Centre, it seems to have indulged in a frenzy of persecutions to cover its stupidity with more examples of malicious incompetence.
The Bureau is a fitting faith-based institution for the times. It has a definite and distinctive modus operandi: to decide upon unlikely suspects and then to pursue them with an unshakeable conviction of guilt regardless of the failure to win conviction. In a sadistic form of barratry, the Bureau treats each failure to secure a conviction as an opportunity to raise new and ancillary charges and all the time leaks to reporters in a way that would in most common law jurisdictions have the judge throwing the case out.
The pressure on the media can be seen in the Washington Post's Orwellian memory hole, where on Friday the paper exposed the weakness of the Bureau's "Gotcha!" leaks, on Saturday completely reversed it with the official version, and then on Sunday re-reversed itself.
Looking at the record of investigative and prosecutorial harassment, it would be presumptuous to take Ivins' suicide as in anyway an admission of guilt. One only has to think of Wen Ho Lee, the manifestly innocent scientist at Los Alamos who faced with a relentless legal war of attrition pled guilty to a token count simply to remove the hazard of a life sentence that accompanied the other 59 spurious espionage charges. It is fitting that in their faith-based fervour the FBI still believes in pseudoscientific polygraphs and then lied to him about the results. Perhaps we should count our blessings that they haven't yet reinvented the ducking stool and left its modern variant to CIA
In the case of Florida professor Sami al-Arian. Despite being acquitted by a jury and entering a plea bargain to be deported to escape the harassment, the FBI now has Arian in prison for contempt charges for refusing to appear as a witness in an entirely unrelated case. Typically, the US justice department has spent $50m on this case. With the happy exception of Hatfill, one sure consequence of their persecution is that their victims have to bankrupt themselves paying lawyers to defend against the charges. Their persecutors just send their bills to the taxpayers. No wonder that suicide seemed a reasonable way out to Ivins, even if he were innocent.
Certainly the pattern is so pronounced that I would seriously consider signing a petition to re-examine Al Capone's case. The Bureau convicted him, you may recall, of tax evasion after a similar trial-by-complaisant-media. Admittedly, there were a few smoking guns in his case. But too many recent cases have been all smoke with no fire - unless you count the burning zeal of close-minded investigators and their willing dupes in the media.
Ian Williams: The anthrax investigation is far from over
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday August 04 2008. It was last updated at 21:00 on August 04 2008.
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