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 ...
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.
The thing that seem odd to me about the overtime is that it’s really not very much time to be developing a weaponized form of anthrax. One would think that a lot more experimentation would be required. Even if one knew the correct procedure in advance to convert the liquid to such a virulent dry form, it seems like some trial-and-error would be involved that would eat up more time.
It's not very much time to do much of anything. I think the FBI is just floating that idea since it might seem credible to the average person who hasn't done lab work.
Even assuming growth rates an order of magnitude faster than what happens in live victims, you'd still be talking about 8 hours of time with a bioreactor (not counting set up time). Add to that the 5 hours needed for conversion to spores (that's a biological constraint of anthrax, so there is no way to make that go faster that I know of), and some period of time for drying (let's assume some rapid drying system by blasting it into a tank of hot helium gas via a pressurized nozzle, which might theoretically allow consistent particulate size based on the pressure used and the nozzle geometry), and you're talking about 14 hours minimum.
Under my thesis they were mailed in Florida but most of them got "lost in the mail" and ended up in the back of a truck for several days. They then languished in warehouses for several weeks, and during that period of time "dried out".
Wonder if the FBI othered using a wet preparation and drying it out in postal stamped envelopes. See if they somehow bust it up into a powder.
That simplifies the tale since no machines to dry and pulverize the anthrax would be needed.
After nearly seven years of a troubled investigation, a guy kills himself and it turns out he's completely to blame and acted alone.
How convenient.
Ping.
How do officials believe Ivins made the anthrax? The FBI says Ivins used his lab to convert anthrax spores into powdered anthrax, but no proof has been presented that he had the equipment or the expertise to do so.
“I’m waiting for it to be shown that the quantity and the quality of the powders in the anthrax letters could have been produced in those suites” at Fort Detrick, said W. Russell Byrne, who retired from Fort Detrick in 2003 and was Ivins’ supervisor from 1998 to 2000. “I don’t know how to make the stuff,” he said.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-anthrax0807,0,4430001.story?track=rss
The FBI are today claiming that Ivins created the powder over a few evenings of work. How does that explain the FBI’s admitted failure to re-create the powder 18 months after Director Mueller announced they were going to begin to try this?
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/Bioter/fbisecretlyrecreate.html
FBI Secretly Trying to Re-Create Anthrax From Mail Attacks
By Dan Eggen and Guy Gugliotta, Washington Post Staff Writers
FBI investigators and federal scientists have been secretly working for months to replicate the type of anthrax used in last year’s deadly mail attacks, as part of a previously undisclosed strategy designed to determine precisely how the spores were manufactured, officials said yesterday.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, who revealed the experiments in remarks to reporters here, said that using such “reverse engineering” could help investigators narrow the list of possible suspects.
“We’re replicating the way or ways it might be manufactured, but it is not an easy task,” Mueller said. “We are going into new territory in some areas.”
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-29-anthrax_x.htm
FBI fails to re-create anthrax production
By Toni Locy, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Two years after the nation’s deadly anthrax attacks, the FBI still has not been able to re-create the process the killer used to produce the substance sent through the U.S. mail, a top FBI official said Monday.
The standard, end of the story explanation is that wrong avenues were pursued in the past.
Yesterday or so NPR had an expert on the record who said Ivins would have needed another piece of equipment other than the lyo-whatever. Here, we have another expert, on the record, who knew Ivins, worked with him, and supervised him, says he couldn’t have made it and doesn’t think Ivins could either.
That’s far enough in my book to think Ivins as innocent, for now.
Stupid question, I’m sure...but was it confirmed that the man OD’d himself and didn’t have any “help”?
I don't know about it being confirmed, but I haven't heard or read of any doubts about the suicide.
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