sentiment for the attack on Iraq. Subsequent memoirs such as those of Bush's first Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill have disclosed that Bush was working on this even before September 11.

Soon politicians such as Senator John McCain were gravely confiding to TV network interviewers that if, as seemed likely, Saddam's anthrax was in the envelopes, then this cemented excited suspicions of an Osama-Saddam terror connection already inflamed by a long and totally inaccurate report in the New Yorker magazine.

The lead government agency investigating the anthrax envelopes was the FBI and the Bureau was under huge pressure to come up with a suspect. The White House leaned on FBI chief Robert Muller to say that the trail pointed to Baghdad. But the Bureau's trail led in a very different direction. Soon a fresh tide of leaks to the New York Times and a few other sources fingered Steven Hatfill, who had worked at the end of the 1990s as a civilian researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the US

Department of Defense's medical research institute for biological warfare defense at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

By 2004 Iraq had been invaded and Hatfill was suing his detractors in the New York Times and other publications for destroying his career. The US Department of Justice disclosed that in March of this year it had taken Hatfill off the suspects list and was compensating him for false allegations, giving the 54-year old $5.8m, with a down payment of $2.825m in cash and $150,000 a year for 20 years.

But the FBI had another suspect, one it had identified but cleared in its initial investigation. This was Bruce E. Ivins a career anthrax researcher at Ft. Detrick, on the team at the US Army Medical Research Institute. With Hatfill out of the picture, the heat was on Ifill and he buckled. On July 29 of this year he died from a mix of Tylenol and codeine, diagnosed as a suicide.

Exactly like Hatfill when the FBI had him in its sights, Ivins has been the target of a torrent of disobliging stories in the aftermath of his death, many of