them apparently inspired by the FBI. A social worker who counselled him claims he was a drunk and a time-bomb of resentments. A practising Catholic, he wrote letters to a local newspaper which called Jews the chosen people and which were hostile to Islam. The Bureau's charge, as with Hatfill, is that with his alleged dispatch of the anthrax-filled envelopes Ivins was setting up Muslims as the originators of the anthrax attacks.

Ivins's suicide has reignited deep suspicions among a handful of journalists, most consistently voiced down the years by Glen Greenwald (a lawyer and blogger on the Salon site), that the US government certainly used, and perhaps even sponsored, the anthrax attacks as a way of ratcheting up national panic after 9/11 to a level where the public would gladly endorse special emergency powers sought by the White House, accepting a Saddam-Osama linkage into the bargain.

Those - I count myself among them - who most emphatically do not believe that George Bush and Dick Cheney masterminded the 9/11/2001 attacks on the Trade Towers and Pentagon

- have much less difficulty in agreeing with these dark surmises. Greenwald, who has written powerfully for a number of years on the dictatorial powers sought and mostly won by the Bush administration, is now calling on Ross (left) and ABC to identify their "four separate sources" who promoted what turned out to have been an entirely bogus discovery of bentonite in the anthrax, and an equally bogus suggestion that anthrax plus bentonite equals Saddam's terror labs in Baghdad.

As Greenwald writes this week, ABC News is not protecting sources. "The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't 'sources'. They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood."

True enough. ABC News is clearly embarrassed by Greenwald's soundly-based charges. Will Ross 'fess up to who fed him the stories? I doubt it. He's been a useful conduit for government leaks on matters such as the utility of water-boarding as a vital weapon in the war on terror. He'll keep his mouth shut, even as public cynicism about Bush and Cheney, and the press, soar to new highs.