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 ...
Lt. Pennington says the death investigation of the Bruce Ivin is still ongoing until they get official confirmation on his cause of death. Although Pennington started a new life in Maryland, he says Las Vegas is still home. He will be back in a few months a visit his mother and father.
http://www.lasvegasnow.com/global/story.asp?s=8813765
WASHINGTON — Despite the Justice Department's pronouncement that former Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins unleashed the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people, three central questions about the case remain unanswered:
_ Can the FBI prove that a flask of anthrax in Ivins' bioweapons laboratory at Ft. Detrick, Md., contained the same mutated strain of finely milled powder that was in the envelopes that were mailed to two U.S. senators?
_ Did Ivins, who committed suicide last week, have the technical capability to produce that form of anthrax?
_ Why, after he came under suspicion in 2005 or earlier, was Ivins allowed to retain a high-level security clearance that enabled him to continue working in the bioweapons laboratory at Ft. Detrick, apparently until this summer?
As federal prosecutors and FBI agents moved to close the seven-year investigation, former employees at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and other biological weapons experts Thursday expressed skepticism about the case that's been presented publicly.
The FBI said Wednesday that it had winnowed eight samples that contained all four of the genetic mutations in the anthrax-laced letters out of 1,000 anthrax samples from 16 laboratories and traced all eight to a batch in Ivins' lab that had the same "DNA fingerprint."
However, Jeffrey Adamovicz, who directed the bacteriology division at Ft. Detrick in 2003 and 2004, said the FBI trail is "a little disturbing" because it relies on a common contaminant in laboratories and in the environment.
While the FBI said it found a unique mutation of that contaminant, Adamovicz said, it has yet to say that this strain "was found in Dr. Ivins' lab and no one else's."
Further, he said, that strain of the anthrax organism "has to have a parent somewhere, which means their assertion that it was only in Ivins' lab doesn't make sense."
Donald Henderson, a scholar at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity who assisted the government in dealing with the attacks, said the FBI's case against Ivins "just doesn't add up." He said the FBI must produce its DNA evidence for scrutiny by scientists.
Some of Ivins' former colleagues also dispute the FBI's assertion that he had the capability to mill tiny anthrax spores and then bind them to silicon particles, the form of anthrax that was mailed to the office of then-senator Tom Daschle, D-S.D..
Adamovicz said the anthrax sent to Daschle was "so concentrated and so consistent and so clean that I would assert that Bruce could not have done that part."
"Just because you're off your rocker doesn't mean you can make something that no one else in the world can make with the kind of equipment that's available," said Richard Spertzel, who worked in the lab for 21 years before he retired in 1987.
Spertzel called the FBI's focus on records that Ivins had checked out a device that could freeze-dry tiny anthrax spores "a red herring," and said he doubted that the lab possessed the equipment needed to mill the spores. ... ...
Ex-colleague questions government’s case against anthrax suspect
GREENCASTLE, Pa. — A former Fort Detrick employee is among those questioning the government’s case against Bruce Ivins, who authorities say was behind the post-9/11 anthrax letters.
Melanie Ulrich of Greencastle, Pa., who teaches at Hagerstown Community College, on Wednesday challenged circumstantial evidence against Ivins that has been made public.
...Authorities say advanced DNA testing matched anthrax spores in Ivins’ laboratory to those that killed five people in 2001, according to The Associated Press. ...Ulrich said she worked with Ivins at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Frederick, Md., for about six years. The person she knew doesn’t match the troubled past Ivins is alleged to have had, she said.
Ulrich said other elements of the case don’t add up, including:
# Whether psychological instability in Ivins’ past could have lingered for years. Ulrich said that in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, anyone at USAMRIID who had access to certain biological agents, such as anthrax, had to go through an intensive, all-encompassing review as part of a Personnel Reliability Program, which trumped, for example, privacy rules for health records.
# A flask in Ivins’ custody that contained anthrax said to be the “parent” to powdered anthrax sent through the mail. Ulrich said different anthrax samples were genetically identical, so that flask can’t be proven to be the “parent” sample. Also, the flask was for aerosol use, which would have been done in a different building than the one in which Ivins worked, she said.
# Ivins’ alleged use of a lyophilizer to make powdered anthrax. Ulrich said Ivins signed out a SpeedVac, but not a lyophilizer, which is too large to fit in a containment hood, or secure protective area.
She said it would take about an hour to dry one milliliter of wet anthrax spores in one vial in a SpeedVac. It would have been impossible for Ivins to have dried more than a liter, which would have been required for the amount of anthrax sent in the letters, in the time frame they were mailed, Ulrich said.
Ulrich was a principal investigator in the diagnostic systems division at USAMRIID.
She said Ivins was a “geeky scientist” who wrote poems and was sensitive and unintimidating.
He had been to her home for USAMRIID social activities, including a barbecue and a party.
She said Ivins was upset the FBI was watching him, but handled it as well as he could. “I’ve never even seen him angry,” Ulrich said.
Ulrich left USAMRIID in 2007. She now teaches at HCC and coordinates the year-old biotechnology program.
Ulrich said the FBI interviewed her within the past year as part of its investigation. She said she can’t talk about what was discussed, but the points she expressed in this story didn’t come up during the interview.
I believe the FBI thesis is that the anthrax mailings were made just shortly before the discovery of people sick with anthrax, but after the 9/11 attack.
That's why they focus so closely on what Dr. Ivins was doing in the laboratory at night.
If, on the other hand the anthrax was acquired BEFORE the 9/11 attack, and was planned to be part of it, the spores could have been mailed in Florida (at Boca Raton in fact) as early as September 7 (Friday before the 9/11 attack).
The spore containing envelopes would have traveled by truck to Philadelphia as items later found to have been lost in the mail in surface transportation because all airlift capacity was grounded.
There were massive delays in processing mail for several weeks after 9/11. Most folks forget about that category of problems.
Iraq comes into the picture as a country well equipped to grow vast quantities of the Ft. Detrick spore sub-variety.
There are people in the FBI who do not want to implicate Iraq.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2058705/posts?page=33#33
Linked to Wash Post article silica v. silicon
http://www.newsweek.com/id/151784?from=rss
When the FBI publicly branded the late Dr. Bruce Ivins as the anthrax killer, it unsealed court affidavits suggesting a possible motive for the mailing to one target: NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. According to the affidavits, Ivins was angry about repeated Freedom of Information Act requests from Gary Matsumoto, identified as “an investigative journalist who worked for NBC News” who was looking into Ivins’s work on an anthrax vaccine. “Tell Matsumoto to kiss my ass,” the affidavit says Ivins wrote in an Aug. 28, 2001, e-mail, noting that was “weeks” before the Sept. 18, 2001, anthrax mailing addressed to Brokaw. But Matsumoto told NEWSWEEK the FBI never interviewed him as part of its investigation. If it had, he says, he could have told them he’d actually left NBC News five years earlier. At the time he was bombarding Ivins’s lab with FOIA requests, he was employed by ABC. “They’re trying to connect dots that don’t connect,” he said.
Justice Department official Dean Boyd said “there was no mistake in the affidavit” because Matsumoto had been employed by NBC in the past and Ivins told investigators he “believed” he still worked there. Still, the reference is one of a number of seemingly misleading passages, gaps and omissions that are raising questions about just how airtight the government’s case against Ivins actually is.
...
“I’d say the vast majority of people [at Fort Detrick] think he had nothing to do with it,” said Jeffrey Adamovicz, who served as one of Ivins’s supervisors in the facility’s bacteriology division.
...
What’s more, Kemp said, the FBI omitted evidence that might have been exculpatory, including that Ivins kept his security clearance after passing a polygraph in which he was questioned about the anthrax investigation. “He was told he had passed [the polygraph] because we thought he did,” said Justice official Boyd. But after the FBI learned of Ivins’s history of psychological problems, it had experts re-examine the results, and they concluded he’d used “countermeasures” such as controlled breathing to fool the examiners.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/washington/10anthrax.html
For Suspects, Anthrax Case Had Big Costs
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and SCOTT SHANE
When Perry Mikesell, a microbiologist in Ohio, came under suspicion as the anthrax attacker, he began drinking heavily, family members say, and soon died. After a doctor in New York drew the interest of the F.B.I., his marriage fell apart and his practice suffered, his lawyer says. And after two Pakistani brothers in Pennsylvania were briefly under scrutiny, they eventually had to leave the country to find work.
...
But along the way, scores of others — terrorists, foreigners, academic researchers, biowarfare specialists and an elite group of Army scientists working behind high fences and barbed wire — drew the interest of the investigators. For some of them the cost was high: lost jobs, canceled visas, broken marriages, frayed friendships.
At the Army biodefense laboratory in Frederick, Md., where Dr. Ivins worked, the inquiry became a murder mystery, the cast composed of top scientists eyeing one another warily over vials of lethal pathogens.
“It was not pleasant,” recalled Jeffrey J. Adamovicz, a former official there. “There was a general sense of paranoia that they were going to get somebody no matter what.”
Some critics fault the F.B.I.’s investigation as ignorant, incompetent and worse. Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who was a Princeton University physicist, said that the disclosures linking Dr. Ivins to the crime notwithstanding, the inquiry was “poorly handled” and “resulted in a trail of embarrassment and personal tragedy.”
...
In late 2001, agents discovered that the germ used in the attacks was not foreign in origin but a domestic strain. That prompted the F.B.I. to focus mainly on scientists inside the United States. Casting a wide net, the bureau sent a letter to the 30,000 members of the American Society for Microbiology. “It is very likely,” it said, “that one or more of you know” the attacker.
./..In 2002, Mr. Mikesell came under F.B.I. scrutiny, officials familiar with the case said. He began drinking heavily — a fifth of hard liquor a day toward the end, a family member said.
“It was a shock that all of a sudden he’s a raging alcoholic,” recalled the relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of family sensitivities.
By late October 2002, Mr. Mikesell, 54, was dead, his short obituary in The Columbus Dispatch making no mention of his work with anthrax or the investigation. “He drank himself to death,” the relative said.
...Another casualty was Kenneth M. Berry, an emergency room physician with a strong interest in bioterrorism threats. In August 2004, agents raided his colonial-style home and his former apartment in Wellsville, a village in western New York, as well as his parents’ beach house on the Jersey Shore.
In scenes replayed for days on local television stations, the authorities cordoned off streets as agents in protective suits emerged from the dwellings with computers and bags of papers, mail and books.
“He was devastated,” Clifford E. Lazzaro, Dr. Berry’s lawyer at the time, said in an interview. “They destroyed his marriage and destroyed him professionally for a time.”
....Dr. Adamovicz, the former Fort Detrick official, said the bacteriological division, which eventually had about 100 people including technicians and assistants, was like a family. But the growing air of mutual suspicion caused conversations to become stilted, even as some scientists became increasingly agitated and isolated from friends and colleagues.
“It became a game to talk in platitudes without mentioning the specifics,” Dr. Adamovicz said. “You had to.”
...The air of growing distrust ended some relationships. At one point, Dr. Ivins was advised by his lawyer to stop speaking with Henry S. Heine, an anthrax colleague. Dr. Ivins was led to believe that Dr. Heine might have raised questions about him.
“They implied that Hank was pointing the finger at him,” recalled W. Russell Byrne, a retired Army doctor who once supervised Dr. Ivins. “They told Bruce that ‘Hank Heine is not your friend.’ Then Bruce’s lawyer told him not to talk to Hank anymore.”
And even Dr. Ivins, according to court documents, began pointing his finger at specific colleagues as suspects.
...Last month, Dr. Ivins told an Army colleague that his experience of F.B.I. pressure was similar to what Mr. Mikesell went through.
“Perry drank himself to death,” the colleague recalled Dr. Ivins as saying some two weeks before he killed himself.
...The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, in his first public comments since the presentation of the evidence against Dr. Ivins on Wednesday, said Friday that he was proud of the inquiry.
“I do not apologize for any aspect of the investigation,” he told reporters. It is erroneous, he added, “to say there were mistakes.”
It came out about June 2001. They had an article that asked members to write to the two Senators and Tom Brokaw concerning some matter.
Their addresses were shown.
Not only were the addresses shown, but the addresses had certain peculiar formatting errors in them ~ the kind that folks would not likely invent on their own.
The anthrax letters carried the addresses of the three targets and repeated the address errors perfectly.
That's where the anthrax attacker(s) got the addresses.
I am really surprised the FBI didn't look into this ~ maybe it destroyed their chain of thought or something.
Anyone with access to the flask in question could have provided an anthrax sample to an outside third party who would then conduct the attack.
There were numerous people with access to that flask.
He's run these critters through THOUSANDS of generations ~ for the most part there have been no mutations whatsoever in almost all of his samples.
Here we have the FBI claiming that forensic science is so good they are able to separately identify anthrax cultivars (in different jars/flasks) due to random mutations ~ and yet random mutations at that rate simply do not occur in the more highly controlled, longer duration experiment with the e-coli.
Let me suggest that the FBI's claim regarding rates of random mutation in bacteria are highly suspect.
If I were in charge of the investigation I'd start investigating them.
some reference was made to it in Focus on the Family (I belive was the name).
For some strange reaon the FBI just skipped, la, la, la, la, past the fact that Greendale Wisconsin is the birthplace of "Earth First" a known terrorist organization not averse to killing unarmed civilians.
Open Questions on a Closed Case
By GERRY ANDREWS
...After reading the affidavits and listening to the Justice Department briefing, I was both disheartened and perplexed by the lack of physical evidence supporting a conviction.
Dr. Ivins was a friend and colleague of mine for nearly 16 years. We worked together at Fort Detrick. He was a senior scientist, and I was, first, a bench scientist and, from 1999 to 2003, the chief of the bacteriology division. ...
As a scientist, however, I feel compelled to comment on what should have been the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s strongest link between Dr. Ivins and the terrible crime — deadly anthrax spores. ...
Dr. Ivins, for instance, was asked to analyze the anthrax envelope that was sent to Mr. Daschle’s office on Oct. 9, 2001. When his team analyzed the powder, they found it to be a startlingly refined weapons-grade anthrax spore preparation, the likes of which had never been seen before by personnel at Fort Detrick.
It is extremely improbable that this type of preparation could ever have been produced at Fort Detrick, certainly not of the grade and quality found in that envelope.
...
Gerry Andrews is an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Wyoming.
Most of the "mutations" that the FBI are looking for are probably so minor that they wouldn't show up unless a complete DNA sequence was performed (something like swapping a few base pairs). I'm not validating their science, but it is in the realm of the feasible. On the other hand, the FBI would, of course, have the burden of proof on showing that the "mutation" only shows up in the samples from the attacks as well as in the flask sample, and shows up no where else (since the sample in the flask checked out to Ivin was inevitably produced from a parent culture elsewhere, that entire parent sample would have to be checked to verify that the mutation didn't occur earlier. Since that task is beyond our current ability to sequence, I'm starting to think that this too is just circumstantial "evidence". Random samples (a few thousand sequenced random samples, all of which would have to show consistent results) of the parent source could, however, provide a decent statistical check. But it could never be proof.
In fact, if the FBI was so inclined, they could obtain samples and sequence all three (progenitor, Ivin's sample, and the attack samples) and by determining the ratio of mutated to non-mutated, they could find how "distant" one sample was from the other. This would allow them to know if the earlier "crude" samples were merely refined to produce the later samples, or if another batch was "brewed up" instead. If they were all from one sample, then the ratios of swapped base pair mutations (assuming there are more than one, which there probably is) would be very close to identical. This would be very difficult to do without either a lot of automation or a lot of hard work. If the FBI actually had this kind of evidence, it would be easy for them to produce it (consisting of a LOT of data for the several thousands of sequences that would be required for any level of accuracy and code snippets of the comparison algorithms used).
They could also isolate the separate strains, and determine if their growth rate is identical or not. If they aren't, then they could even determine how many generations they are separated (i.e., how many "batches" the culprits made). A really clever terrorist could theoretically overcome this by brewing up a batch from a single, carefully selected anthrax bacterium, but I can't really see someone of the terrorist mindset going to that much trouble (since it would extend their growth time by a considerable amount while actually increasing the "uniqueness" of their product. It would be like making sure your fingerprint was on the delivery mechanism and clearly recoverable).
After Anthrax Scientist’s Threats, Counselor Faced a Hard Choice
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/09/AR2008080902108.html
On the morning of July 10, Jean C. Duley decided she had a phone call to make. She had agonized all night. Her counseling client, Bruce E. Ivins, had announced in a group therapy session the evening before that he was a suspect in the 2001 anthrax investigation and had a plan to kill his co-workers.
From her desk at Comprehensive Counseling Associates in Frederick, Duley called the Frederick Police Department to report Ivins’s threats. The scientist was taken into custody that afternoon and placed in a psychiatric hospital. A day later, the FBI showed up at Duley’s office for the first time.
“Everyone thinks I was complicit with the FBI,” Duley said in an interview Friday. “The FBI didn’t tell me anything.”
...
Re: Gerry Andrews.#93
There seems to be universal agreement about this.
Everyone who knows anything
about the production of anthrax
seems to be saying the same thing
Later on, after the attack, the Fibbies come in looking for evidence of some peculiarity in the attack anthrax and find it, lo and behold, right where Saddam's agent put it.
Later on, after the attack, the Fibbies come in looking for evidence of some peculiarity in the attack anthrax and find it, lo and behold, right where Saddam's agent put it.
7 DUIs. No one believes this.
This is my opinion,and, unless I see some powerful evidence to the contrary, I’m sticking with it:
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