Posted on 04/23/2010 9:03:24 AM PDT by Palter
A former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the F.B.I. has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001, told a National Academy of Sciences panel on Thursday that he believed it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, as the F.B.I. asserts.
Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, “Absolutely not.” At the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine worked, he said, “among the senior scientists, no one believes it.”
Dr. Heine told the 16-member panel, which is reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the investigation, that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab. Such an effort would not have escaped colleagues’ notice, he added later, and lab technicians who worked closely with Dr. Ivins have told him they saw no such work.
He told the panel that biological containment measures where Dr. Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent the spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. “You’d have had dead animals or dead people,” he said.
The public remarks from Dr. Heine, two months after the Justice Department officially closed the case, represent a major public challenge to its conclusion in one of the largest, most politically delicate and scientifically complex cases in F.B.I. history.
The F.B.I. declined to comment on Dr. Heine’s remarks on Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The FBI’s story is it was “this guy” until they decided it was “that guy” and one of them committed suicide so they are SURE that it was him and are having to pay a settlement to the other guy that they were certain at one time did it.
That’s the story in a nutshell.
“no Islamic terrorism, nope, we solved this case!”
bookmark
Ping
NY Slime shilling for the Federal Bureau of Incompetence.
In my opinion, the FBI hounded this poor man to death. Shame on them.
Was Abderraouf Jdey the Anthrax Mailer?
The author of the above theorizes Jdey got the anthrax strain from Dr. Ali Al-Timimi, who, before he became a terrorist doing life+70, was a biologist who worked closely with Dr. Charles Bailey, a former USAMRIID deputy commander.
They ask an expert, Adam Driks of Loyola, how long it would take the make the spores in the powders, and he says "a number of days."
Heine ridiculously claimed it would take a year
PING
The FBI knows that. They also know that their case against Dr. Ivins is not strong enough to give me the award.
Seems so long ago.....that death in NYC......
BioPort and BettyJO!
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