The chief biological inspector for the U.N. Special Commission from 1994 to 1998 - who describes himself as one of the "four or five people in the whole country" who could make the type of anthrax used in the 2001 attacks - noted in testimony to Congress:
 

"I have maintained from the first descriptions of the material contained in the Daschle letter that the quality appeared to be such that it could be produced only by some group that was involved with a current or former state program in recent years. The level of knowledge, expertise, and experience required and the types of special equipment required to make such quality product takes time and experimentation to develop. Further, the nature of the finished dried product is such that safety equipment and facilities must be used to protect the individuals involved and to shield their clandestine activity from discovery."

Similarly, a manufacturer of specialized anthrax equipment said:

"You would need [a] chemist who is familiar with colloidal [fumed] silica, and a material science person to put it all together, and then some mechanical engineers to make this work . . . probably some containment people, if you don't want to kill anybody. You need half a dozen, I think, really smart people."

The U.N. biologist mentioned above also said that the equipment to make such high-tech anthrax does not exist at Fort Detrick, where Ivins worked. People who work at Fort Detrick have confirmed this.

In other words, a lone scientist couldn't have done it without the support of a whole government laboratory. And Fort Detrick was not one such potential laboratory.

What Does the FBI Say?

Until 2006, the FBI seemed to support this conclusion, but then suddenly and inexplicably changed its mind. According to the New York Times, the FBI changed its mind and took the position that the anthrax was not high-tech -- and thus could have been produced by a "lone nut" -- based upon a single paper published by one of its scientists.

The new theory was shown to be unsupported by any evidence in any of various scientific papers
(see this and this). And even the editor of the journal in which the new FBI hypothesis was published later criticized the article:

"The statement should have had a reference. An unsupported sentence being cited as fact is uncomfortable to me. Any statement in a scientific article should be supported by a reference or by documentation."

In other words, the FBI scientist just made up the new claim that the anthrax was not so high-tech that it had to have been made by a government-sponsored bioweapons program.

So why did the FBI change its tune, based upon an unsupported statement by one of its scientists?

Well, if the evidence pointed to state-sponsored terror, ruled out states the U.S. government wanted to blame the attack on (such as Iraq), and actually pointed towards America as being the "state sponsor", the government might want to distract people from the true culprits, right? Especially given that producing weaponized anthrax violates laws to which the U.S. is a signatory, and could constitute war crimes, right?

Indeed, on September 4, 2001, the New York Times revealed that the government was going to produce a highly-potent anthrax strain at a military lab in Ohio.

And Dugway Proving Grounds had been producing high-grade, dry, weaponized anthrax for quite some time before the attacks, and had shipped Ames strain anthrax "back and forth" with Fort Detrick.

Since 16 labs and many hundreds of people had access to the exact strain of anthrax used in the attacks, a state-sponsored operation could have been set up almost anywhere in the U.S.

They needed a patsy to pin the attacks on and deflect the fact that this was a false flag operation which also implicated an illegal bioweapons program. The anthrax attack was a state-sponsored crime in search of a patsy.