http://www.gazette.net/stories/08142008/walknew191857_32465.shtml
Ivins’ colleagues remain skeptical
Aug. 6
by Keith L. Martin and Margarita Raycheva | Staff Writers
A day after the U.S. Justice Department released hundreds of pages of court documents detailing its case against Dr. Bruce Ivins, Dr. W. Russell Byrne sat in disbelief about the possible link between his friend and colleague and the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks.
“I am absolutely stunned at what they consider evidence,” said Byrne, who headed Ivins’ USAMRIID division from 1998 to 2000. “… Plus, all these e-mails. I knew [Ivins] was having a hard time in life, but I did not know this was the way it was.”
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Other anomalies include the fact Byrne said Ivins knew e-mails were not “private” and could be read by anyone. And, he argued, if the FBI had hairs from the Princeton, N.J. mailbox where the anthrax letters were mailed, why were they never compared with Ivins’ hair?
“I think [the public] is being taken advantage of because they don’t know the science … or know anything about USAMRIID,” Byrne said.
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Byrnes’ skepticism is matched by Dr. Meryl Nass, a Maine physician and expert on anthrax and bioterrorism who has testified before Congress. She met Ivins in 1991 and last exchanged correspondence with him six years ago.
Since the government’s case has been made public, Nass has posted several questions on her Web site – www.anthraxvaccine.org – and said the Justice Department’s case is not clear. The closest link the FBI found between Ivins and Princeton, she said, is a detail of Ivins’ alleged fascination with the Kappa Kappa Gama sorority, which has an office near the Princeton collection box.
“The profusion of non-evidentiary material is profound,” she said. “If the FBI is spending [pages] detailing his connection to a sorority … it is pointing that out because it doesn’t have a case … The FBI knows this case is too complex for the public to comprehend, that’s why this nonsense [about the sorority] is out there.”
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-web-anthrax-lataug14,0,4362601.story
Anthrax hair samples don’t match
By Carrie Johnson | The Washington Post
7:19 PM CDT, August 13, 2008
WASHINGTON - Federal investigators probing the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks recovered human hair samples from a telltale mailbox in Princeton, N.J., but the strands did not match the lead suspect in the case, according to sources briefed on the probe.
FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data in an effort to place Fort Detrick, Md., scientist Bruce E. Ivins at the postbox from which germ-filled letters were sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said.
The hair sample is one of many pieces of evidence that researchers continue to puzzle over in the notorious case, which ended abruptly after Ivins committed suicide while prosecutors prepared to seek his indictment.