Posted on 08/07/2008 11:49:06 AM PDT by Shermy
WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday outlined a pattern of bizarre and deceptive conduct by Bruce E. Ivins, an Army microbiologist who killed himself last week, presenting a sweeping but circumstantial case that he was solely responsible for mailing the deadly anthrax letters that killed five people in 2001.
After nearly seven years of a troubled investigation, officials of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department declared that the case had been solved. Jeffrey A. Taylor, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said the authorities believed “that based on the evidence we had collected, we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Lawyers for Dr. Ivins reasserted their late client’s innocence and criticized the government for presenting what they called “heaps of innuendo” that failed to link him directly to the crime and would never have to be tested in court. “It was an explanation of why Bruce Ivins was a suspect,” said Paul F. Kemp, who represented the scientist for more than a year before his death on July 29 at age 62. “But there’s a total absence of proof that he committed this crime.”
The conflicting views of Dr. Ivins emerged in a day of emotional crosscurrents. At a morning memorial service at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., weeping Army scientists praised Dr. Ivins as a beloved colleague “known for his patience and enthusiasm for science,” as a written program put it. At the same time, at F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, and bureau officials were explaining to survivors of the anthrax attacks and relatives of the five people who died why they believe Dr. Ivins was a mass murderer.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That “acted alone” phrase sure sounds familiar .
Maybe now they can catch Whitey Bulger.
‘presenting a sweeping but circumstantial case’
How profound.
It's not really that suspicious once you accept the magic envelope theory.
He wrote scores of letters to members of Congress and the news media, sometimes under assumed names, the documents said. Investigators wrote that the mailings were “significant since all of the anthrax-laden letters were sent to” media organizations and Congress.But see here:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0806081anthrax5.html
The FBI said "hundreds" of letters to and FROM "various members of society". Only "Among others" were to Senators and "various news organizations" (I bet mostly his local paper)>
Then the next paragraph focuses on media and Senate.
But there is nothing in this, when examined closely, that says letters to Senators and media were more than 1% of the letters. Maybe 5%. If it were 95% the FBI would be waving that flag. Additionally, did he write before to any of the victims?
“acted alone”
So what was the ‘until very recently’ heavy promotion of the angle that Hatfill was the one behind it?
Before the genetic analysis, all we knew was that it was the Ames strain and could have come from any number of labs around the world. But apparently the cost of sequencing a particular sample has come down a thousand fold between 2002 and now (I read an estimate of $500K to $500). Of course, the whole conclusion turns on the validity of the new techniques.
You're lying.
Again.
Love,
L
Surprise, surprise. No mention in the NY Times about Ivins being a long time and active Democrat.
Confirms one suspicion I’ve long held; at least some Democrats write scores of letters under assumed names - lying effectively - in order to make their numbers seem larger than they are or conceal biases.
Do you think this is true? Do we know this from any other source but the FBI?
The Bruce Ivins Memorial Poetry Nook
http://exiledonline.com/the-bruce-ivins-memorial-poetry-nook/
Rats Live On No Evil Star
(Ed Ode)
(A palindrome reads the same forwards and backwards)
Ma handed Edna ham
Ma is as selfless as I am
Kayak salad, Alaska yak.
Campus Motto: Bottoms up, Mac
Wow! Sis! Wow!
Wonton on salad? Alas, no, not now!
“Desserts, sis?” (Sensuousness is stressed).
Desserts I desire not, so long no lost one rise distressed.
“Do nine men interpret?” Nine men, I nod.
Doc, note I dissent. A fast never prevents a fatness. I diet on cod.
May a moody baby doom a yam?
Marge let a moody baby doom a telegram.
Oh who was it I saw, oh who?
Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo?
Was it a car or a cat I saw?
War! I saw ‘Nam — man was I raw.
We panic in a pew.
We’ll let Mom tell Lew.
‘Tis in a DeSoto sedan I sit.
To Idi Amin I am an idiot.
Race fast, safe car.
Rats live on no evil star.
Toot! Toot!
Too hot to hoot.
Stop, Syrian! I start at rats in airy spots.
Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots.
Trap a rat! Stare, piper, at star apart!
Trade ye no mere moneyed art.
If I had a hi-fi!? If I had a hi-fi!?
I, madam, I made radio. So I dared! Am I mad? Am I?
Ah! A mop, a man, a map: Omaha!
Was it felt? I had a hit left, I saw.
Solo gigolos.
So many dynamos.
Oh, no! Don Ho.
Ogre, flog a golfer. Go!
Ten animals I slam in a net.
Pets, Ed, I sidestep.
Yo Bob, mug a gumbo boy!
Young Sten nets gnu! Oy!
Nurse, save rare vases, run!
Now, sir, a war is won.
Mad? Am I, madam?
Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam!
Reviled did I live, said I, as evil did I deliver.
Revered now I live on. O did I no evil, I wonder ever?
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
Are we not drawn onwards, we few, drawn on to new era?
Dr. Nass notes the “overtime” before the first wave of letters is suspiciously the same over three days: 2 Hours, 15 minutes. Excerpt from Firedoglake’s timeline.
___________________________________
Spring 2001: Ivins taken off Special Immunization Program
September 7, 2001: Ivins put back on Special Immunization Program
September 14, 2001: Ivins works late for 2 hours 15 minutes
September 15, 2001: Ivins works late for 2 hours 15 minutes
September 16, 2001: Ivins works late for 2 hours 15 minutes
September 18, 2001: Less lethal “media” anthrax letters postmarked
...
September 28: Ivins works late for 1 hour 42 minutes
September 29, 2001: Ivins works late for 1 hour 20 minutes
September 30, 2001: Ivins works late for 1 hour 18 minutes
October 1, 2001: Ivins works late for 20 minutes
October 2, 2001: Ayaad Asaad interviewed about claim he was a bioterrorist; Judy Miller’s Germs published; Ivins works late for 23 minutes
October 3, 2001: Ivins works late for 2 hours 59 minutes
October 4, 2001: Ivins works late for 3 hours 33 minutes
October 5, 2001: Ivins works late for 3 hours 42 minutes; Bob Stevens, photo editor of Sun newspaper, dies
October 2001: Ames strain at Iowa State destroyed with consent of FBI
October 9, 2001: Ivins works late for 15 minutes; Daschle and Leahy letters postmarked
_______________________________________________
The good doctor thinks these identical times are a clerical error.
I think not.
I think they are a clerical malfeasance, of a mild sort, and more likely, Ivins did not do the overtime on those days.
I bet dollars to doughnuts Ivins had monthly or quarterly hour requirements for his job, that he missed a lot of days do to his troubles, and a helpful clerk entered bogus overtime to prop up his friend. Kind of like Hillary’s time records at her law firm.
Happens all the time. Since he was probably on salary, no overtime payouts would be a consequence. No money harm, no foul.
Here is what Dr. Nass says about Matsumoto
12. Ivins cursed about giving journalist Gary Matsumoto information requested in a Freedom of Information Act request. Matsumoto is a most peculiar journalist. We had a number of conversations. He would not get off the phone, sometimes staying on for an hour or more. He would harass me, in an attempt to shape the story. He worked very hard, trying to force me to say that the only problem with anthrax vaccine was its squalene adjuvant, although there were many reasons to question that assertion. I hung up on him more than once, exasperated, and no doubt I used some foul language describing our conversations to others.
“acted alone”
I can beat that,
“sole custodian”
BTW, did the documents reveal any “forensic psychiatrists” who labeled Ivins a “Homicidal maniac” or close to that? If so, that could mean that the FBI told that to Social Worker Duley, who told a judge “top forensic psychiatrists” made that conclusion.
The outrageous thing is the U S Attorney and FBI coming out and trashing a dead guy who cannot defend himself. Up front they concede it was a highly unusual step to speak about a case where the target had died and there was not a conviction or even charges filed BUT...we want to put the case in its best light now because the good Doctor cannot show how badly they bungled this investigation. The government can crush anyone. Ask Richard Jewell. These people are gutless wonders.
Some survivors of the attacks and members of Congress said they were persuaded by the evidence against Dr. Ivins, laid out in hundreds of pages of applications for search warrants unsealed for the first time. But some independent scientists, friends and colleagues of Dr. Ivins remained skeptical, noting that officials admitted that more than 100 people had access to the supply of anthrax that matched the powder in the letters.
I don’t believe it.
For one thing, how did this suspect know that the newspapermen killed in Florida, had a real estate agent wife who once helped the 911 hijackers find a place to live?
Whoever did this not only had anthrax, but what must have been secret information.
You're lying.
LOL.
I wonder what's harder to believe--
That the FBI is lying . . .
Or that the government allows a "homicidal" maninac with a history of psychological problems, to work in its deadly germs lab?
Some good blasts from the past:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/archive/1873368.stm
‘Asked if he was tested for the germ that has killed three people already this month, or if he was taking precautionary antibiotics, Bush replied simply: ``I don’t have anthrax.’’
At least some White House personnel were given Cipro six weeks ago. White House officials won’t discuss that, or who might be receiving the anthrax-treating antibiotic now.
``If the White House were to start to reveal the security measures including health protections that are in place for the president ... people who would want to do harm to the president would know what protections are in place and therefore they could shift their tactics,’’ Fleischer said.
On the night of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House Medical Office dispensed Cipro to staff accompanying Vice President Dick Cheney as he was secreted off to the safety of Camp David, and told them it was a precaution, according to one person directly involved.
At that time, nobody could guess the dimensions of the terrorists’ plot. ‘
Oh, he acted alone too. ;^)
AMEN
I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt there, since such a determination seems reasonable as an extrapolation of known science (I haven't read the technique they used, but I could see it being just an issue of comparing some minor mutation from a coding error showing up in both samples and nowhere else).
So let's assume that it did come from that lab. Now the question becomes, who in that lab who had access to anthrax would be the most likely suspect? Your choices include:
1. The alpha-male larger-than-life white guy (Hatfill).
2. The 62 year old Catholic pro-life democrat (Ivins).
3. The son of an Iraqi diplomat who happens to also be a convicted agent of al Qaeda (al Timimi).
Just to make it a bit more interesting, lets add in the fact that the FBI has distorted some evidence and made a number of false statements about two of these suspects, while completely ignoring the third (since he has foreign ties to Iraq, he must be innocent, because we know this was domestic terrorism because we profiled it that way).
“The outrageous thing is the U S Attorney and FBI coming out and trashing a dead guy who cannot defend himself. “
Oh, get over it. He used fake screen names on the internet! He engaged in battles over wikipedia entries! To top it all off, sometimes the diabolical fiend would ask them to email him before they changed his edit back — all part of a sinister plot to distract them from correcting the entry. He read Camus! He worked late after 9/11 even though he was just in military biodefense. The only reason they didn’t suspect Ed is he never works past 5 p.m. and he doesn’t read literature. The evidence, crediting the sampling, points to a match at one of the eight labs downstream from him. Oh, and let’s not forget their Greendale speculation. Treble Rebel, assuming it was silicon (and not silica) — just for the sake of discussion — what was the source of silicon? Assuming there was subtilus contamination, what was the source given that they genetically typed it? Is Venable going to come out with a rebuttal on the merits? It was inappropriate for the newspapers to be editorializing without hearing from the other side on the merits. I’m on vacation but I hope someone compiles his wikipedia entries chronologically. And get the Greendale specialist from the Washington periodical on their incredibly stupid Greendale speculation. Venable needs to bring suit under the civil rights statute and take civil discovery of all the evidence to include all emails he wrote, including from September 2001.
There you have it. A homegrown American Terrorist takes the easy way out.
/sarc
I don’t get the Matsumoto/NBC angle, I mean, why release it? It only raises questions why the Feds don’t have similar explanations for ABC, CBS, New York Post, and AMI.
I AM over it. But thanks for the laughs. I think you are Thomas Pynchon “faking” a screen name. You write as well if not better. Keep up the good work.
OK, if this is true then the guy really was stone cold nuts, but it's another claim in the ever-growing list of things that I'm skeptical about. I wonder if anyone besides the feds has had access to all these "letters" yet.
Each drip of information that we're getting sounds harder to believe than the last.
The girls of Kappa join in the cover-up!
http://gawker.com/5034402/anthrax-babes-lament-were-boring
” Hey girls–
I just wanted to let everyone know that the group has been made secret for at least the next week in order to protect members’ privacy. If you are the admin for a pledge class group, I would recommend that you make that group secret as well, and to all members, I would strongly encourage you to either up your privacy settings or weed out your facebook profile so that nothing is on there that you wouldn’t want the world to see. Finally, if a reporter contacts you, through facebook or any other means, do not speak with them. It is Kappa National Policy that actives not speak with the press. If you have any questions, you can call or email me.
L,
Diana
Update -
BREAKING NEWS: FBI Director Robert Mueller dated a Kappa.
ENQUIRER HEADLINE: DIRECTOR DOESN’T KISS AND TELL
Even assuming that Ivins was the lone perp-
When’s the FBI going to get around to explaining how the head of an active terrorist cell, Ali A Timimi, could get past the background check?
And what is their explanation for all the circumstantial evidence that contradicts the lone perp theory?
So the FBI drove a man they knew was “unstable” to suicide by harassing his kids and his wife.
Of course they knew of his “instability” from his shrink, but they still pushed his buttons.
SOP for the FBI, but I hope the agents are proud they pushed this man to kill himself, besmirching his name in the process, ensuring he wouldn’t be able to defend himself or prove his innocence.
Case closed.
The letters are to and FROM “society” figures.
There is not one bit of evidence the fake name letter/s were other than to his local paper, which is curious, but
why would using a fake name for a letter to the editor have anything to do with a propensity to write a fake name on an anthrax letter? What else would a criminal do?
Also, the first letters had no fake name and address.
>>their explanation
Conspiracy Nut, you!
It sure sounds like I'm not the only one who isn't buying what they're selling out of the Hoover building!
They should explain and release a photo of the envelope error.
And get the input of stamp collectors.
Standard operating procedure.
What is his link to Florida where the 9-11 hijackers lived and partied? The dead tabloid editor was in Florida.
I wonder if the FBI can show how Ivins suppossedly produced such a
high-quality, non-milled, weakly-charged, polyglass-coated spores.
A former colleague of Ivins wrote a good article that appeared
in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 5 detailing FBI descriptions of
the anthrax spores that were used in the attacks...and multiple qualities
that Ivins almost certainly couldn’t have built into those spores.
As I don’t have on-line access to WSJ, I’ll post a little bit of
the controversy as mentioned on CNN:
FBI accused of hardball tactics in anthrax case
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/06/fbi.tactics/?iref=mpstoryview
(excerpt from end of article)
Peter Hotez, chairman of microbiology at George Washington University,
rejected the government’s contention that Ivins’ access to a sophisticated
lab device called a lyophilizer — used to dry anthrax — was in
any way damning.
And Richard Spertzel, a former colleague of Ivins at Fort Detrick,
said there was “no way” a lyophilizer could have created the fine
anthrax spores used in the 2001 letters.
In addition, Spertzel said, no one working at a U.S. government
lab could have produced such high quality anthrax in secret.
Essentially the crux of their “case” is that he had access to the particular variety of anthrax.
Nothing else. That’s supposed to imply causality. And Motive?
Oh, he’s a lone nut plagued by private demons.
Talk about feces on a shingle.
My opinion is that heads should roll over this at the FBI. The evidence that they are incompetent is as compelling as is their evidence that this Ivins guy is guilty.
And he stayed late at night.
But they disavow any possibility that he may have provided spores to someone else (who refined them elsewhere).
I think not.
I think they are a clerical malfeasance, of a mild sort, and more likely, Ivins did not do the overtime on those days.
I bet dollars to doughnuts Ivins had monthly or quarterly hour requirements for his job, that he missed a lot of days do to his troubles, and a helpful clerk entered bogus overtime to prop up his friend. Kind of like Hillary’s time records at her law firm.
Happens all the time. Since he was probably on salary, no overtime payouts would be a consequence. No money harm, no foul.
Dr. Ivins' place of work is under high security: Not only are people's times in the building recorded, but people's whereabouts as well. There is no way anyone entered bogus times for him.
It is not at all unusual for a scientist to spend extra hours at work, or to work odd hours, at night, on weekends, and holidays. Science is not a 9 to 5 endeavor. He could have been doing a time course experiment, where experimental manipulation or sampling has to be done at specific times, and that easily accounts for the same amount of overtime worked on 3 consecutive days.
Dr. Ivins was a friendly man, who would say hello whenever he saw me, at work or at the gym. He didn't behave in a manner that would set alarm bells ringing. The investigation, continuing long past the point when the FBI should have realized they weren't getting any new information, must have put him under a great deal of stress. How convenient, now that the stress led Dr. Ivins to tragically take his own life, to declare the case closed. It sure allows the FBI to save face, since they never did have a good lead on this one.
Well, to me it’s a political thing.
See, we also solved the Anthrax mailings case.
Legacy time.
How convenient..
Postal Inspector: Anthrax suspect had communist ties
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/anthrax-suspect-had-forei_b_117414.html
I would say it definitely needs to be confirmed independently. The link below theorizes the FBI was putting pressure on Ivins hoping to get him to cop a plea or otherwise implicate himself further, in part because they had doubts about the admissibility of the new genetic analysis.
Experts Question FBI's Genetic Test in Anthrax Case (Update2)
Well, I'm now reading estimates that as many as 100 people (up from ten) might have been able to get their hands on Ivins's stash. The FBI claims to have spent the last two years ruling out 99 of the 100 (including Hatfill). So, a good question: was al Timimi among the 100?? At least one blogger seems to believe so:
It appears that the anthrax itself was stolen from a George Mason University biodefense research project funded by the National Institutes of Health and using anthrax obtained from the U.S. Army biodefense facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Islamic ideologue Ali Al-Timimi was working several offices away from the project's lead scientists. As a computer expert, Al-Timimi evidently was able to access the computer files of these scientists to obtain the documents for a patent they were filing in 2001 on a method to treat biological samples such as anthrax spores. Al-Timimi presumably also found a way to steal small samples of the scientists' anthrax, which he apparently then provided to Muslim scientists in a northern tier state or in Canada (the isotopic ratio in the water used to prepare the Mailer's anthrax was typical of water from the U.S.-Canada boundary region) to prepare the anthrax using the patent application instructions. He then provided the prepared anthrax to Mohamed Atta.
One has to hope the FBI checked this out with the utmost thoroughness.
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