The U.S. military 'inadvertently' shipped live anthrax samples via FedEx — just in time for another Patriot Act vote...again!

America. Land of the free, home of the whenever there is legislative opposition to the Patriot Act, anthrax magically ends up in the mail.

Yes, it's happened again, folks. The Patriot Act — the hilarious name for the hellish nightmare which, "even in the security-über alles climate that followed 9/11, was recognized as an extreme and radical expansion of government surveillance powers" — has once again faced resistance from a few whiny U.S. senators. And once again we have some more military-grade anthrax floating through the mail. Those wacky senators never learn!

Disinfecting a mailbox -- a copy of The New York Times was found in it...

Yours truly was blamed for the anthrax attack which killed five people in September, 2001 — just in time to put Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle in their respective anthrax-laced places.

The investigation into the mysterious 2001 attack took almost seven years; I ended up "killing myself" long before that, but you know — it's always good to tie up loose ends.

And now we have this:

The White House is ratcheting up pressure on the Senate to renew expiring provisions of the Patriot Act after senators failed to reach an agreement last weekend. ... The Obama administration is making increasingly dire warnings about what will happen if the Senate fails to renew the Patriot Act on Sunday.

And one day later, via CNN:

Four Defense Department workers in the United States and up to 22 overseas have been put in post-exposure treatment, a defense official said, following the revelation the U.S. military inadvertently shipped live anthrax samples in the past several days.

So weird! It's as if you could casually mail one of the world's deadliest bioweapons, without realizing what you were doing, la-la-la-la-la.

Too bad you can't blame me, or Saddam Hussein — we're both dead! Pass that Act before someone gets hurt!

P.S. - The FBI's lead investigator into the 2001 anthrax attack says that I'm innocent. He was fired from his job for saying so. Now he is suing the FBI.

Dr. Bruce E. Ivins was a former researcher at Fort Detrick, home of the military’s leading biodefense facility, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. He didn't write this article, because he's dead.