So the thing they told us in college when everyone was freaking the fuck out about anthrax-filled letters popping up all over D.C. was that, really, the chance of being targeted was near-zero because a) the supply of anthrax is almost nil, b) its difficult to make and c) the number of people with access to it can be counted on your first five fingers.
Here’s a short list — culled from his FBI file published by The Smoking Gun — of reasons Dr. Bruce Ivins probably shouldn’t have been allowed to hang around labs with Bacillus anthracis inside. Now, the case could be made that none of these things taken alone is enough to condemn the man’s personality (who doesn’t like to slip on some ladies panties from time to time?), but the volume of Ivins’s peculiar habits is a little much to ignore:
He had a decades-long “obsession” with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, because he was turned down for a date by one of its members in the early 1960s, while doing his undergraduate work at the University of Cincinnati.
He “[did] hold grudges” including one against the New York Yankees, for no particular reason, and was a bit of a sports conspiracy theorist, having commented several times that he thought most soccer injuries were “dives” for penalties.
He had a weird sex life, such as it was — into bondage, blindfolds, etc. and had a stream of pornographic materials and “stained” — nahmean? — underpants flowing through his home, landing in the trash, where they were picked up by FBI agents (I’d hate to be the sucker on that detail).
I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” which posits (and I apologize for butchering Gladwell’s work by way of brevity) that a small number of individuals command a great degree of clout when it comes to shaping dialogue, fashion, disseminating information and even spreading disease. The argument applies, though imperfectly, here: the concern should never have been how much Anthrax there was around, or how many people had access to it, but who, precisely, those people were. Obsessive sex-freaks, perhaps, need not apply.
Doc Anthrax
So the thing they told us in college when everyone was freaking the fuck out about anthrax-filled letters popping up all over D.C. was that, really, the chance of being targeted was near-zero because a) the supply of anthrax is almost nil, b) its difficult to make and c) the number of people with access to it can be counted on your first five fingers.
That’s all fine, unless one of those fingers is an obsessive, depressed sexual deviant who also happened to be a cross-dresser (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Here’s a short list — culled from his FBI file published by The Smoking Gun — of reasons Dr. Bruce Ivins probably shouldn’t have been allowed to hang around labs with Bacillus anthracis inside. Now, the case could be made that none of these things taken alone is enough to condemn the man’s personality (who doesn’t like to slip on some ladies panties from time to time?), but the volume of Ivins’s peculiar habits is a little much to ignore:
I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” which posits (and I apologize for butchering Gladwell’s work by way of brevity) that a small number of individuals command a great degree of clout when it comes to shaping dialogue, fashion, disseminating information and even spreading disease. The argument applies, though imperfectly, here: the concern should never have been how much Anthrax there was around, or how many people had access to it, but who, precisely, those people were. Obsessive sex-freaks, perhaps, need not apply.