There's other evidence that indicates that Ivins was thinking about sending at least one letter containing anthrax through the mails prior to 9/11. For example, the date on the media letter seems to have been added later with a different pen.
And the "hidden message" he put in the letter is another indicator that he was working on the letter prior to 9/11. It doesn't seem likely he would have come up with that if he started after 9/11.
It appears that 9/11 turned an vague idea into an actual project.
It appears that you can rationalize anything that Ivins did and say it's just normal routine. But, that's the way circumstantial evidence works. You can rationalize this and you can rationalize that, but when you look at all the evidence together, it's clear that Ivins was the culprit.
He destroyed evidence; he tried to mislead the investigation; he had no alibi; he controlled flask RMR-1029, which was the "murder weapon"; he had a history of driving long distances to mail things so they wouldn't be traced back to him; he had all the necessary skills; he was observed throwing out the code books used for the "hidden message" in the media letters; he made non-denial denials several times, where he suggested that if he did it and just couldn't remember, he certainly didn't mean to harm anyone.
I could go on and on. And you can dream up ways each item could be "normal," but they wouldn't appear "normal" to a jury when all of the evidence is viewed together.
Yeah, no doubt written by a 6 year old.
Yeah, no doubt written by a 6 year old.
You keep pointing at things that are perfectly normal for scientists, and reading all kinds of sinister motives into them. Furthermore, every single piece of "evidence" is completely circumstantial and/or coincidental. There is absolutely no "smoking gun" that would have tied him (or anyone else) to the anthrax letters. However, there are plenty of reasonable explanations for his activities, which I'm sure his lawyer would have made very good use of to plant that "reasonable doubt" in the jurors' heads had poor Ivins not been so stressed by the FBI's relentless hounding that he killed himself.
With the kind of evidence that supposedly damns Ivins, I'm surprised you haven't had an arrest warrant issued for exDemMom yet, because I am just as guilty of working odd hours, having periods of intense lab activity, and working with things that can kill people.