It has been too many years since the nation experienced the frightening anthrax attacks in 2001, but now it seems investigators are narrowing in on some suspects – finally:

he FBI has narrowed its focus to “about four” suspects in the 6 1/2-year investigation of the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001, and at least three of those suspects are linked to the Army’s bioweapons research facility at Fort Detrick in Maryland, FOX News has learned.

Among the pool of suspects are three scientists — a former deputy commander, a leading anthrax scientist and a microbiologist — linked to the research facility, known as USAMRIID.

The FBI has collected writing samples from the three scientists in an effort to match them to the writer of anthrax-laced letters that were mailed to two U.S. senators and at least two news outlets in the fall of 2001, a law enforcement source confirmed.

More background here on the loose security that could have allowed a sleeper agent access to the deadly material:

n November 2007, FBI Director Mueller gave a speech in which he warned against the need to guard against spies at universities, who for example, may have access to pre-patent, pre-classification biochemistry information.

A colleague of leading anthrax scientist Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID Deputy Commander Charles Bailey, a prolific Ames strain researcher, was convicted of sedition and sentenced to life plus 70 years in prison. He worked in a program co-sponsored by the American Type Culture Collection and had access to ATCC facilities, as well as facilities of the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense at George Mason University then run by Dr. Alibek and Dr. Bailey. Grants by the Defense Advance Research Project Agency (”DARPA”) funded unclassified research using avirulent Ames strain from the National Institute of Health (NIH). The bionformatics grad student once had a high security clearance for mathematical support work for the Navy.

…

A former FBI agent in the New York office who asked not to be identified, told author Peter Lance: “Understand what this means. You have an Al Qaeda spy who’s now a U.S. citizen, on active duty in the U.S. Army, and he brings along a video paid for by the U.S. government to train Green Beret officers and he’s using it to help train Islamic terrrorists so they can turn their guns on us. By now the Afghan war is over.” Steve Emerson once said of the former US Army Sergeant who was Ayman Zawahiri’s head of intelligence and taught Bin Laden and Atef and others spycraft: “Ali Mohamed is one of the most frightening examples of the infiltration of terrorists into the infrastructure of the United States.

Universities were notoriously rebellious about security, naively thinking their good intentions were sufficient defense against misuse. The tragic irony is our military and supporting industrial complexes also work under good intentions (defense of this nation), but they also are aware of the responsibility they have been handed in dealing with weapons that can kill in massive numbers.

I would guess Hollywood’s juvenile representations of the evil military is how a lot of universities rationalized their stubborn refusal to be responsible, which is why you cannot learn about the world from the boob-tube, you can only use it to enjoy fictionalized stories of the human condition and challenges. Once you start thinking TV is real (does anyone really think drinking Budweiser brings on the ladies?) you have lost your grip on reality.

But as we can see, complacency was not limited to universities. Years of living peacefully and without serious threat caused even our most critical national security agencies to drop their guards:

Infiltrator Ali Mohamed was the “Teflon terrorist” and serves as a useful historical example as author Peter Lance so well demonstrates in the detailed 2006 book Triple Cross. Ali Mohammed, an EIJ member who was associated with the unit that killed Sadat, had an alibi for the Sadat assassination. He was at “an officer exchange program studying at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where Green Beret and Delta Force officers receive training.” After he was forced out of the Egyptian Army for his radical beliefs, he went to work at Egyptiair, as a security advisor, where he learned how to hijack airliners. He then joined the CIA and the US Army. A supply sergeant at the US Army’s Fort Bragg, where he lectured Green Beret and Delta Forces on the middle east, he stole high resolution maps from the map shack and brought them to Ayman in Afghanistan. In 1989, Ali Mohamed traveled from Fort Bragg to train men that would later commit WTC 1993. When Ali Mohammed traveled to Brooklyn, he stayed with Islamic Group and Abdel-Rahman’s bodyguard Nosair, the man who would assassinate Rabbi Kahane in 1990.

Complacency is where the liberal democrats want to return to. They naively believe if they pretend there is no threat there will be no disaster. Believing in a fantasy is OK to some degree, but as the saying goes – better safe than sorry. And I mean heart-wrenching tragedy on a massive scale sorry. And this threat is still out there, make no mistake about it:

In a chilling sign that Islamist terrorists continue seeking weapons of mass destruction, a jihadist website recently posted instructions on making deadly anthrax for biological weapons.

The website disclosed the illustrated instructions March 17 and included additional links, and promised to provide information on a delivery system in the future, a Cessna airplane.

“The wait has been long, but the time has arrived, God willing. It is the glad tidings of being able to use biological weapons against the enemies of God. So, allow me to present to you a simple recipe for making anthrax, God willing,” the web site stated.

So why is Congress still holding up the FISA legislation that has protected this country from attack for going on 7 years now? God only knows. And hopefully they and we are not about to learn a very harsh lesson. Not sure how good this reporting is, but it is very frightening if true.