In partial spite of my tongue-in-cheek writing up of Bruce Ivins’s oddball lifestyle in the run up to his mailing Anthrax letters to members of Congress shortly after September 11, 2001, a second look at the document proves absolutely chilling. I didn’t notice this upon first read, because some of the paragraph is cut off on The Smoking Gun’s posting of documents from his FBI file, but it deserves mentioning, if only to prove my point (which was, partially, simply that this guy was a creep):

IVINS then inquired about SSA [redacted] present state of health and proceeded to state the gross facts regarding a motor vehicle accident (MVA) writer was involved in back in August 2004. SSA [redacted] has never disclosed the facts or circumstances of this accident with IVINS on any occasion, or any other individual at  USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked].

If I’m understanding this correctly, Ivins researched and memorized a dossier of his interrogator before or during the course of questioning (which, I gather, took place over a number of sessions). To what end, one wonders. It seems to me that Ivins was aware, at least to some extent, of his eccentricities. Did he do it just to fuck with them? Did he, perhaps, hold himself up against Kevin Spacey’s ultra-brilliant but severely disturbed character in Seven, who commits a vile, heinous murder in accordance with each of the seven deadly sins? The comparison alone is enough to make the skin crawl.

One wonders what the interrogator must have felt at that moment, having what sounds as though might have been one of the most disturbing moments of his life retold to him by a mad scientist with a God complex.