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Well, as you see on the sidebar, Bruce Ivins’ suicide tops English-language newspapers just about everywhere. But the story is more murky than it seems at first glance, and most reports hedge rather than proclaim the anthrax-attacks mystery solved. I’m just going to try to run through a bit of what’s out there and see where it might point (but this is long enough that I’ll put the rest of it after the jump) . . .

Of course, the LA Times — a paper repeatedly battered by corporate-triggered turmoil lately — gets major kudos for breaking the story. I hear from a friend out there that Dave Willman (LAT’s Washington Bureau investigative reporter) and researcher Karen Lundblad were subjects of an all-employees e-mail from Exec Editor John Arthur yesterday. Good on them. Today, Willman’s back with a lede story headlined Anthrax scientist Bruce Ivins stood to benefit from a panic. Therein we read,

… As a co-inventor of a new anthrax vaccine, Ivins was among those in line to collect patent royalties if the product had come to market, according to an executive familiar with the matter.

The product had languished on laboratory shelves until the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax mailings, after which federal officials raced to stockpile vaccines and antidotes against potential biological terrorism.

A San Francisco-area biotechnology company, VaxGen, won a federal contract worth $877.5 million to provide batches of the new vaccine. The contract was the first awarded under legislation promoted by President Bush, called Project BioShield.

One executive who was familiar with the matter said that, as a condition of its purchasing the vaccine from the Army, VaxGen had agreed to share sales-related proceeds with the inventors. …

This story goes on,

One former senior official with Ivins’ employer, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, whom the FBI questioned at length about Ivins, said he believed his former colleague wanted more attention — and resources — shifted to biological defense.

“It had to have been a motive,” said the former official, who suspects that Ivins was the culprit. “I don’t think he ever intended to kill anybody. He just wanted to prove ‘Look, this is possible.’ He probably had no clue that it would aerosolize through those envelopes and kill those postal workers.”

Here, a passage from a multimedia-packed NYT story pertains:

Scientists familiar with germ warfare said there was no evidence that Dr. Ivins, though a vaccine expert with easy access to the most dangerous forms of anthrax, had the skills to turn the pathogen into an inhalable powder.

"I don’t think a vaccine specialist could do it," said Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff, a physician who aided the F.B.I. investigation when he worked at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.

"This is aerosol physics, not biology," Dr. Zelicoff added. "There are very few people who have their feet in both camps."

Mr. Ezzell said Dr. Ivins had worked on many projects involving anthrax spores and the toxin they produce, including experiments in which animals were exposed to anthrax to test vaccines. But he said the experiments, to his knowledge, involved anthrax spores in liquid and not in the dry powder form used in the letter attacks.

Though Ivins was by most accounts a well-liked, well-adjusted co-worker and family man, his personality seems to have changed drastically under the pressure of the FBI investigation. Today’s lede NYT story begins,

Bruce E. Ivins arrived last month for a group counseling session at a psychiatric center here in his hometown with a startling announcement: Facing the prospect of murder charges, he had bought a bulletproof vest and a gun as he contemplated killing his co-workers at the nearby Army research laboratory.

"He was going to go out in a blaze of glory, that he was going to take everybody out with him," said a social worker in a transcript of a hearing at which she sought a restraining order against Dr. Ivins after his threats. …

Similarly, WaPo:

For most of his career, he was a casting agent’s vision of a bench scientist: shy, eccentric, nerdy, soft-spoken. But sometime this spring, with the FBI closing in on him, Bruce E. Ivins’s life took a dark turn that frightened his closest friends. …

Another Page One WaPo story has it,

Authorities investigating the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings used previously unavailable techniques to trace the lethal powder to the office where scientist Bruce E. Ivins worked at the sprawling Army biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., according to sources briefed on the investigation.

Investigators were so certain about the connection that they had scheduled a meeting for last Tuesday with Ivins’s attorneys to discuss a plea bargain that would have sent the scientist to prison for life but spared him a death sentence, according to sources briefed on the government’s case. But barely two hours before the meeting was to occur, Ivins died of an overdose of Tylenol that he had ingested over the weekend, the sources added. The death was ruled a suicide. …

Several reporters have quoted Thomas Ivins, Bruce’s estranged eldest brother. They hadn’t spoken for over 20 years, but Thomas says he wasn’t surprised.

“He buckled under the pressure from the federal government,” Thomas Ivins said, adding that FBI agents came to Ohio last year to question him about his brother.

“I was questioned by the feds, and I sung like a canary” about Bruce Ivins’ personality and tendencies, Thomas Ivins said.

“He had in his mind that he was omnipotent.”

Maybe so. But Glenn Greenwald has now updated his post six times with material that opens to question many a facet of the Ivins-story-as-so-far-reported (note especially Updates III, IV, and V, and don’t miss this video of astute — just ask him –  John McCain on Letterman, hyping the alleged Saddam-anthrax attacker link; hooboy and h/t ThinkProgress).

Meanwhile, I’ve heard (but didn’t see) that Keith Olbermann and Gerald Posner were on teevy last night tearing up the peapatch with tinfoil-ly theories. I don’t know whether those included the old favorite, that 9/11 was an inside job (which I’ve never credited for a second), but it is certainly plausible that a set of high-placed plotters who didn’t anticipate 9/11 intended “Amerithrax” to be the first in a series.

We know that the administration’s focus was Iraq from the moment President Cheney – I mean Bush — took office. We also know they contemplated, eventually rejecting, a fake shootdown of a UN plane. So this bad-for-Saddam gig could have been in the works for a while and wouldn’t necessarily have needed slapping together in the week after 9/11. In any case, if “Amerithrax” was a one-off (as it most looks to me), they certainly took it, ran with it, and used it for as long as they could.

That and WaPo columnist Richard Cohen’s admission that a “high government official” told him before “Amerithrax” to stock up on Cipro (and I doubt he was the only one so warned) stink.  The whole thing – from Richard Cohen’s being tipped on prophylactic Cipro to Ivins’ being tipped about his forthcoming indictment – stinks. It’s these nameless, faceless informants who spill just enough of the right stuff to the right recipient at the right time: I mean, what are the odds of a series of coincidences like that?  WHO were those informants and WHAT were they trying to achieve? This gives me itches that no reporter yet has scratched. 

So this passage, again from NYT, speaks for me:

Representative Rush Holt, a Democrat whose district includes the Princeton, N.J., mailbox where investigators believe the letters were mailed, said the F.B.I. should provide a full briefing.

"What we learn," Mr. Holt said, "will not change the fact that this has been a poorly handled investigation that has lasted six years and already has resulted in a trail of embarrassment and personal tragedy."