From USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-08-13-anthrax_N.htm?csp=34
WASHINGTON — Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, whose Senate office received the first anthrax-tainted letter in 2001, says he is satisfied the FBI has found the culprit.
Daschle, a former Democratic senator from South Dakota, called the Justice Department’s case against Bruce Ivins, an anthrax scientist at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., “complete and persuasive.”
“I think the evidence is pretty compelling,” he told a group of reporters at USA TODAY’s Washington bureau.
...
The most compelling evidence Daschle heard was that the DNA “fingerprint” of the anthrax could be traced to a flask controlled by Ivins.
“That’s as close to a smoking gun as I think you’re going to get,” Daschle said.
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The best thing about this article, the title,
“Daschle buys Ivins as sole culprit in 2001 anthrax attacks”
I think there’s some editorial disapproval in “buys”
Nagging Questions in the Anthrax Case Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008 By LAURA FITZPATRICK Time Magazine
As probable bioterrorists go, Bruce Ivins was a near-perfect suspect. Among the hundreds of pages of evidence that the FBI had mounted against him and released last week, there were electronic records documenting Ivins' late-night sojourns in the lab, e-mails revealing a mind wracked by paranoia, and an inventory of a November 2007 FBI search of his home, which turned up a paperback copy of Albert Camus' novel, The Plague. [I don't think she's being sarcastic]
....Anthrax experts interviewed by TIME point to the peculiarities of anthrax research that underscore why it is critical that the FBI's methodology be evaluated. Most important is that anthrax has historically been shuttled freely around the world — a fact that the FBI has not explicitly accounted for. Until the security crackdown that followed the 2001 attacks, most labs readily sold anthrax strains — including the type linked to Ivins — to scientists doing research in other parts of the world. "Bruce, like most people in the lab, derived most of his strains from outside sources," says Jeffrey Adamovicz, a former bacteriology chief who worked with Ivins at Fort Detrick's U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) for 12 years. If the FBI has not investigated every one of those possible sources, in other words, it can't be certain that the path to Ivins is solid. No one but the FBI knows for sure....
...While even the staunchest critics of the FBI acknowledge that publicizing details about new technology may pose a national security risk [WARNING: FIRST HINT OF USE OF "NATIONAL SECURITY" EXCUSE TO NOT REVEAL DNA TESTINGS], others insist that doing so and hastening a firm conclusion to the "Amerithrax" case would only make the country safer. "To know what challenge you're defending against is terribly important," says Henderson. Further, the FBI's technology may prove useful for other "benign reasons," such as in vaccine research or in legal investigations involving poisoning, says Adamovicz... ...Holt, a former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the only scientist to sit on the House Intelligence Committee, expects the hearings to spark broader debate about the way the government handles certain scientific issues, including policy questions — such as how to ensure lab security — and a general attitude regarding the scientific method. "[The FBI] try to confirm their hunches, whereas a scientist tries to refute his or her own conclusions," says Holt. "The whole point of science is to publish it, so that other people can tear it apart."
There is so much NJ local media material that absolutely does not fit into the Ivins scenario. If we are to believe the Princeton Greek Society were connected, then why did the FBI trace photo copies of the letters to Rutgers? There was suppose to be a specific copy machine that made a marking that matched something. They were close to something. Then, all of a sudden, out of no where, they were draining a pond in another state.