The Washington Post has their lengthy report up on the evidence released by the FBI this afternoon against Bruce Ivins, the bioweapons researcher who killed himself last week after he had become the government’s main suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Some of the evidence the FBI shared with the public today included that Ivins sent emails with wording that was sometimes identical to the language used in the anthrax-laced letters, that he kept odd, late hours in the Ft. Detrick lab where he worked in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and that Ivins was the custodian of the particular strain of anthrax used in the mailings that killed five people.

The Post story does a pretty good job of staying skeptical — not something we can say for many others we’ve read over the last week. Since he died of an overdose of Tylenol and is not around to speak for himself, little tidbits of the troubled life Ivins reportedly had been living have dribbled out. Ivins had big problems with alcohol and sleeping pills. He was obsessed with a college sorority. He was acting funny, and had serious mental health issues. Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald describes the “FBI’s coordinated leaking” as “quite dubious, in some instances laughably so.”

Today, the Post went with the headline, “Anthrax Investigators Unveil Some Evidence Against Ivins,” which isn’t bad. That ‘Some’ is pretty key there. Compare that with the Associated Press, which appears to have been writing up every leak it gets from the FBI without hesitation (and was responsible for the whole sorority story, which successfully made Ivins seem really creepy, but didn’t actually place him at the New Jersey mailbox the anthrax was mailed from). The AP went with “Documents, US officials: Ivins only anthrax killer”. That’s pretty interesting, considering The New York Times story points out in its second paragraph that Ivins was “not the sole person with access to that anthrax,” and The Washington Post similarly ends theirs by noting that “the science leaves open the possibility that someone else had access to a flask of bacteria Ivins prepared.”

What do you think of the FBI’s case against Ivins? Are you convinced?

(AP Photo/Frederick News Post)