Rep. Rush D. Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey, the site of the postal box where the letters were mailed, reintroduced legislation Tuesday to establish an 11-member commission to study the anthrax attacks.

"There are still questions to be answered and still lessons to be learned," Holt said. "It would take a credulous person to believe the circumstantial evidence that the FBI used to draw its conclusions with such certainty. The FBI has not proven to me that this is an open-and-shut case."

Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also called for further investigation of the anthrax scare, saying the new report "shows that the science is not necessarily a slam dunk."

It is hard to overstate the political significance of the anthrax attacks. For reasons I've described at length, that event played at least as much of a role as the 9/11 attacks in elevating the Terrorism fear levels which, through today, sustain endless wars, massive defense and homeland security budgets, and relentless civil liberties erosions. The pithy version of the vital role played by anthrax was supplied by Atrios here and here; in essence, it was anthrax that convinced large numbers of Americans that Terrorism was something that could show up without warning at their doorstep -- though something as innocuous as their mailbox -- in the form of James-Bond-like attacks featuring invisible, lethal powder. Moreover, anthrax was exploited in the aftermath of 9/11 to ratchet up the fear levels toward Saddam Hussein, as ABC News' Brian Ross spent a full week screeching to the country -- falsely -- that bentonite had been found in the anthrax and that this agent was the telltale sign of Iraq's chemical weapons program, while George Bush throughout 2002 routinely featured "anthrax" as one of Saddam's scary weapons. [my emphasis]