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Of course, the whole conclusion turns on the validity of the new techniques.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt there, since such a determination seems reasonable as an extrapolation of known science (I haven't read the technique they used, but I could see it being just an issue of comparing some minor mutation from a coding error showing up in both samples and nowhere else).

So let's assume that it did come from that lab. Now the question becomes, who in that lab who had access to anthrax would be the most likely suspect? Your choices include:

1. The alpha-male larger-than-life white guy (Hatfill).
2. The 62 year old Catholic pro-life democrat (Ivins).
3. The son of an Iraqi diplomat who happens to also be a convicted agent of al Qaeda (al Timimi).

Just to make it a bit more interesting, lets add in the fact that the FBI has distorted some evidence and made a number of false statements about two of these suspects, while completely ignoring the third (since he has foreign ties to Iraq, he must be innocent, because we know this was domestic terrorism because we profiled it that way).

3. The son of an Iraqi diplomat who happens to also be a convicted agent of al Qaeda (al Timimi).

Well, I'm now reading estimates that as many as 100 people (up from ten) might have been able to get their hands on Ivins's stash. The FBI claims to have spent the last two years ruling out 99 of the 100 (including Hatfill). So, a good question: was al Timimi among the 100?? At least one blogger seems to believe so:

It appears that the anthrax itself was stolen from a George Mason University biodefense research project funded by the National Institutes of Health and using anthrax obtained from the U.S. Army biodefense facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Islamic ideologue Ali Al-Timimi was working several offices away from the project's lead scientists. As a computer expert, Al-Timimi evidently was able to access the computer files of these scientists to obtain the documents for a patent they were filing in 2001 on a method to treat biological samples such as anthrax spores. Al-Timimi presumably also found a way to steal small samples of the scientists' anthrax, which he apparently then provided to Muslim scientists in a northern tier state or in Canada (the isotopic ratio in the water used to prepare the Mailer's anthrax was typical of water from the U.S.-Canada boundary region) to prepare the anthrax using the patent application instructions. He then provided the prepared anthrax to Mohamed Atta.

One has to hope the FBI checked this out with the utmost thoroughness.

You undoubtedly recall the thread we had a couple of months back about the guy who has something like 30,000 jars of e-coli culture. They're supposedly sealed and so forth, but he claims that the e-coli finally "mutated" so they could digest acetate, not just sugar.

He's run these critters through THOUSANDS of generations ~ for the most part there have been no mutations whatsoever in almost all of his samples.

Here we have the FBI claiming that forensic science is so good they are able to separately identify anthrax cultivars (in different jars/flasks) due to random mutations ~ and yet random mutations at that rate simply do not occur in the more highly controlled, longer duration experiment with the e-coli.

Let me suggest that the FBI's claim regarding rates of random mutation in bacteria are highly suspect.