Embarrassed Justice Department officials rushed on Tuesday to correct their own filing in a lawsuit over the 2001 anthrax letters after learning that it appeared to contradict the Federal Bureau of Investigation's conclusion that Bruce E. Ivins, an Army scientist, prepared the deadly powder in his Army laboratory. Lawyers for the department's civil division wrote in the July 15 filing that the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick, Md., "did not have the specialized equipment in a containment laboratory that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters." – New York Times

Dominant Social Theme: Police work in the US is as good as it gets.

Free-Market Analysis: The New York Times recently reported on the case of Bruce E. Ivins, who committed suicide after being pursued by the Federal Bureau of Investigations over sending anthrax-laced letters to members of Congress and others.

According to the filing, which was required by a Florida lawsuit from a victim of the anthrax letters, the Army lab "did not have a lyophilizer, a freeze-drying machine, in the space where Dr. Ivins usually worked." It is true that there were such facilities elsewhere in the building, but Dr. Ivins did not have direct access to them and it would have been difficult, apparently, to have gained that access, surreptitiously or not.

The news about Dr. Ivins was notable because the FBI has been fighting off allegations that they had targeted the wrong man. Dr. Ivins killed himself in 2008 while facing a murder indictment as the sole actor. The FBI brass has never accepted that they might have been wrong about Dr. Ivins.

Even after this death, they continued their investigations, ultimately releasing a report that delved deeply into his personal life and presented a profile of a man with a troubled personal life; the FBI reportedly pressured the Ivins family as well in an attempt to generate a confession.

FBI top guns remain confident they had the right individual. "We are confident that we would have proven his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at a criminal trial," a department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said, according to the Times. The Times also noted the following:

The flap was only the latest in an investigation that some members of Congress have accused the bureau of bungling. Before focusing on Dr. Ivins, the bureau spent years pursuing another former Fort Detrick scientist, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, before exonerating him and paying him a settlement worth $4.6 million. More recently, a National Academy of Sciences panel criticized the bureau's technical work on the case, saying the investigation of Dr. Ivins was not as airtight as the government claimed.

The Obama Administration itself has not wanted to see the case reopened. Reportedly, the President threatened to veto an entire intelligence authorization bill because it was going to come to his desk with a bipartisan amendment funding an independent inquiry into the FBI's anthrax investigation. "The commencement of a fresh investigation would undermine public confidence in the criminal investigation and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions."

The FBI has been in the news for another reason recently. The agency has been in court explaining it cannot find videotapes from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing sought by a Utah lawyer for an ongoing lawsuit over the attack. "[The agency does] not believe another records search is reasonable or will uncover the information, the agency has told a federal judge," according to AP. Here's some more from the AP article, which appeared online on July 5:

FBI officials are "unaware of the existence or likely location of additional tapes" that would fulfill the Freedom of Information Act request filed by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, agency attorneys said in court papers filed last week. Trentadue sued the FBI and the CIA in 2008 to get the videos and contended the FBI's efforts to locate the information have been inadequate. He is looking for surveillance tapes taken the morning of the bombing from exterior cameras on the Murrah building and dashboard camera video from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol's arrest of Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was convicted of and executed for the bombing.

Trentadue asserts that the videos exist and will expose that others were involved in the domestic terrorist attack that killed 168 people. But attorneys for the agency said the electronic databases have not turned up the records, nor have manual searches of FBI crime labs, evidence centers or a warehouse in Oklahoma City. A further search of a records cache totaling an estimated 450,000 documents — from just the first 14 days of the investigation — in the warehouse would be "unreasonably burdensome" and could take a single staff person more than 18 months to conduct, court papers said …

Trentadue said in an email to The Associated Press that the government's explanations don't provide any new information. "In short, nothing but more of the same institutionalized dishonesty, deception and disrespect for the Constitution," Trentadue wrote. Trentadue also said the explanation downplayed the purpose of various FBI electronic databases and that a declaration from an FBI official in charge of FOIA responses conflicted with former agents and officers who have provided information in the case.

While these are disparate incidents, they are merely the latest occurrences in a series of unresolved issues that go back many years. Beginning with the FBI's inexplicable determination to maintain the Mafia did not exist during J. Edgar Hoover's lengthy leadership, questions inevitably crop up in major cases.

The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and M. L. King have been embroiled in considerable controversy. According to the government, James Earl Ray shot Dr. Martin Luther King, but there was never any physical evidence and James Earl Ray immediately retracted a confession he claimed was coerced into giving. Dr. King's family later won a civil court case proving there was a conspiracy. A photo shows witnesses standing over Dr. King after the shooting and pointing in exactly the opposite direction from where Ray was supposed to have fired. It would seem there was another shooter.

Then there is the infamous "magic bullet" that caused so much damage to John F. Kennedy and others driving in the car with him on that fatal day. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested as the lone gunman but many have never believed that he acted alone, or that he even fired the fatal shots, which could have been delivered by snipers located behind the "grassy knoll." Here's a description of the single bullet theory from Kennedy researcher Gerald McKnight:

According to the Warren Report the missile hit JFK in the posterior neck, then without striking any hard object passed through the neck to exit at the front of his throat. It then entered Texas Governor John B. Connally's back at the right arm pit, sliding along his fifth rib, demolishing four inches of the rib before it exited his chest below the right nipple. The bullet then allegedly struck and shattered the radius of the right wrist on the dorsal side, then exited at the base of his palm and hit his left thigh just about the knee.

The Report then asserts that CE 399 traveled about three inches beneath the surface of the skin, hit the femur and deposited a lead fragment on the bone. Then, sometime later, with a spasm of reverse kinetic energy it spontaneously exited the hole in Connally's thigh and neatly tucked itself under the mattress of a stretcher parked in a hallway of the Parkland Memorial Hospital that the Report asserted was linked to the wounded governor. There it rested calmly under the mattress waiting for its rendezvous with history.

In March 2011, a lawyer for Sirhan Sirhan – confessed assassin of Robert F. Kennedy – presented new evidence at a parole board hearing claiming he was potentially brain washed and could not remember the shooting. "There is no question he was hypno-programmed," lawyer William F. Pepper told ABCNews.com. "He was set up. He was used. He was manipulated."

Pepper introduced new evidence that there was a second gunman who was fatally shot after his victory in the 1968 California presidential primary. According to ABC, Pepper believes Sirhan was "hypno-programmed," essentially brainwashed to kill Kennedy and his memories were then erased.

The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan has strange twists. Here's a description of his wounding from "Killtown, The Reagan Shooting Conspiracy." It has similarities to the Kennedy magic bullet hypothesis: "Hinckley supposedly hit Reagan with his sixth and last shot. Not only that, but this lucky last shot supposedly flattened to the size of a dime after it ricocheted off Reagan's limo and bounced 90 degrees and in between the narrow gap of the open rear limo door (opposite opening), hit Reagan underneath his left armpit, glanced off a rib, turned over like a coin then tumbled into his left lung barely missing his heart, all the while his arms were being pinned downed by a Secret Service agent who was hustling him into the limo."

Dozens of witnesses to the infamous public school Columbine shootings claim that there were many more shooters than just Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. A summary entitled "Columbine: What Really Happened," posted at the alternative news site "What Really Happened," lists testimony from over 100 eye-witnesses claiming multiple additional participants dressed in black trench coats and carrying rifles and bombs in knapsacks.

9/11 is just the latest and perhaps most controversial in this sad litany of questionable, high profile shootings and bombings. With a majority of 9/11 Commission members now saying their conclusions are in doubt because of false testimony apparently given by the George W. Bush administration and US Intel agencies, a new investigation is called for.

The narrative is flawed and the facts are in question, to put it mildly. But the chances appear unlikely. The poisoning of the good faith of the body politic will apparently continue. President Obama may be concerned, but the actions of those in power are reinforcing public skepticism and alienation.

There is more of course, much more – a melancholy catalogue of questionable occurrences surrounding numerous high-profile criminal incidents. Most recently, the US and the world witnessed the killing of Osama bin Laden. Yet bin Laden's death had been reported by Fox news over ten years ago (based on reports from Pakistan) and more recently as well. He had not made a certifiable appearance in an audio or video presentation for perhaps a decade outside of various tapes that are apparently the false-flag work of American military intelligence. You can see our article here: Osama bin Laden Is Dead Again?

What is notable and disturbing is that so many major deadly incidents in the US (ones that have changed the course of American history and often resulted in a diminution of freedom) are the subject of great controversy. This pattern, clearly visible by now on the Internet, leads to other doubts as well.

We've often voiced our skepticism recently about the NASA moon landings. While on the face of it, such doubts are absurd, given the litany of confusion above, we would argue that a stance of disciplined distrust is warranted. For every piece of evidence that humans went to the moon there is a countervailing one. The arguments are easily found on the 'Net.

Previously, we were puzzled by the arrogance of what seems to be a pattern of violence and deception. But recently we discovered the work of Douglas Reed, who traced the history of money power in his recently released book Controversy of Zion. You can see our article about this here: Anti-Semitism, Douglas Reed and Zion.

What occurs to us now is that the recent history of America and the Western world has at its root a Pharisaical system based on liturgy that goes back thousands of years. The system postulates a chosen few and a mass of "animals" beneath … both Jews and Gentiles. It has been an extraordinarily successful system, especially in the past few hundred years, but its reign may be coming to an end as the Internet Reformation exposes its manipulations.

Depersonalize the mass of people on the planet as unworthy and unclean, and these deceptions become far more comprehensible, as do the constant assertions of the elites that there are too many people on the planet. Plans for a "culling" within this context become explicable, as well. (The rage that must reside in the human heart is less understandable.)

When one steps back and reviews the pattern of the occurrences mentioned above, the amount of questions that arise is truly startling. One can draw conclusions – certainly hypothetical ones – that do not bode well for the future of the US and some of its highest institutions, as well as the citizens who have offered their trust.