J. Edgar Hoover...Where Are You Now that We Need You? or Anthrax, AntiDepressants Vodka & an FBI With Attention Deficit Disorder

Who the fuck do we have working and running the once-vaunted FBI?

If we are to believe the latest information supplied by the Bureau, the story reads like this:

1. After seven, seven, seven years of intense investigation, the FBI categorically asserts that some scientist by the name of Ivins is the man who committed the anthrax crimes, which resulted in five deaths and other assorted injuries to human beings.

2. We are also told by the Bureau that the guilty man was one of the top scientific consultants/advisers to the Bureau during the course of its investigation.

3. DoJ tells us that Ivins, their man in anthrax, so to speak, was also a psychopathic, drug- and alcohol-abusing individual who was telling his "therapist(s)" that he was going to go out in a "blaze of glory" by shooting to death his colleagues at the workplace. Oh, and, by the way, he also, from time to time during the investigation, was institutionalized/hospitalized for ODing on drugs; and, he also got in the habit of pounding a liter of vodka away every night.

4. He was still an employee in good standing at the USGovernment anthrax/bio-weapons facility when he offed himself.

Is it any wonder that Osama bin Laden roams free, that Iraq is what it is, that the Taliban are re-surging in Afghanistan, when we cannot even figure out who, in an extremely limited universe of possible suspects, is the enemy or one of our consultants?

The new president will inherit a federal government apparatus, in all it multifarious spheres of activity, that has a track record of ineptness unmatched in the history of the Nation.

Prioritizing the house-cleaning will not be easy. But the leadership of the FBI must be dismissed forthwith; at the lower levels, those with any significant connection to the anthrax fiasco should be dismissed as well and the reason for dismissal made unambiguously clear: Gross Incompetence.

I take no joy at all in writing this piece. The Bureau, with its alleged resistance to some of the more viscous tactics expounded by the Bush Admin in its confused War on Terror, seemed to be one of the last federal institutions clinging to competence and principle.

The anthrax case vitiated those hopes for me.