WITH AS little fanfare as possible, the Bush White House admitted last month that the anthrax letter attacks following September 11 almost certainly came from a homegrown terrorist.

For weeks after the anthrax cases first appeared, administration officials regularly pointed the finger at Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. But they almost certainly knew at that point what the military only revealed publicly in mid-December--that the U.S. Army had recently manufactured small stores of "weaponized" anthrax that causes the deadly inhalation form of the disease.

Tests now show that anthrax spores in the letters sent to Sens. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) match the military's stocks. This suggests that the anthrax mailer is a rogue researcher or government agent--someone with access to the military's anthrax.

Funny that the Bush administration doesn't seem so interested in that kind of "evildoer."

"[T]he guy who did this may be someone that the Bush administration never wants to see the light of day," wrote the liberal Web site BuzzFlash. "After all, prosecuting a renegade-type present or former intelligence agency member or a bio-geek version of Timothy McVeigh might distract from our war on 'evildoers' overseas by focusing on the fringe right-wing evildoers amongst us."

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